Elvis and the Real Colonel Parker

The standard view of Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis Presley’s manager, is that he was a shyster, a conniving conman who manipulated Presley as he saw fit, pushing him into the army, then into a series of lousy movies, and finally onto never-ending tours, all while bilking his client for every dollar he could get his hands on. That’s how he’s depicted in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis (2022), the most recent high profile Presley-related release. And the lawsuit the Elvis estate filed against Parker in 1981, alleging “collusion, conspiracy and fraud” seemed to confirm that interpretation, though Parker counter-sued, and the case was settled out of court.

Enter Peter Guralnick, the acclaimed author of the definitive biographies of Presley, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley and Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley; Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll, about the Sun Records founder who released Presley’s first records; and Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke, among other notable works. While Parker naturally turns up in the Presley and Phillips books, he now takes centerstage in Guralnick’s latest book, The Colonel and The King: Tom Parker, Elvis Presley, and the Partnership That Rocked the World.

It presents quite a different view of Parker from the received wisdom. Far from hindering his greatest client’s career, he was instead “guilty” of “defending his artist at every turn.” Guralnick’s source? Parker’s own words, drawn from the tens of thousands of letters written by him that are now the property of the Elvis estate. A sampling of these never previously seen letters comprise about a third of the book, ranging from a 1963 letter in which Parker complains that Presley’s Memphis Mafia buddies aren’t keeping the King’s fridge clean enough (“I am sure it would not be allowed to happen if you were at your own house”) to a sorrowful 1976 letter about Presley’s declining physical state (“It will be a miracle from the way things are at present if we will complete or even start this tour”). Presley would die the following year. Guralnick also spoke extensively with Parker’s second wife, Loanne, “the only witness,” he says, to Parker’s private side.

“I felt strongly that Colonel had simply had never gotten his due,” Guralnick says of the man who had a most remarkable life. Born Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk in Holland in 1909, he came to the US illegally in the 1920s, taking on the name “Tom Parker.” He became the manager for country stars Eddy Arnold, Gene Austin, and Hank Snow, and was awarded the honorary title of “Colonel” (which he used as his first name) by Louisiana Governor Jimmie Davis in 1948. And that’s before even meeting Presley with whom he conquered the world.

Parker died in 1997. Guralnick spoke with Book and Film Globe about why Parker never got his citizenship, his proposed memoir, How Much Does It Cost If It’s Free?, and how Parker and Presley were locked in a deteriorating relationship neither could break free of.

Book & Film Globe: So, this book came about because of your looking at Colonel Parker’s letters.

Peter Guralnick: It was totally because of the letters. From the moment that I got into the archives and saw the letters, it was just like, “Oh my God, this is a completely different person than the world has imagined.” Or even that I had imagined. Had things proceeded as planned, the letters probably would have come out not long after the Elvis Day By Day book [which Guralnick co-wrote with record producer Ernst Jorgensen]. But then Lisa Marie [Presley, Elvis’s daughter] sold the estate and things changed.

And at the same time I started talking to Loanne. And she was so committed to the idea of doing what she could to restore Colonel to his rightful place in history. The letters provided a window into an interior world. You can see a great deal of emotion. You can see a great deal of frankness and openness. And combining them with Loanne’s memories; she had worked with Colonel from 1970 on [before marrying him in 1990]. And so with her memories, observations, the records she kept, and also her emotional attachment to Colonel, it just became a very different book as time went on. There were no limits to the love that Loanne felt for Colonel, and yet she was committed to telling the truth. It must have hurt, it must have really hurt to document his growing addiction to gambling and the toll it took on him. And also the toll that it took on his relationship with Elvis. I mean, it’s almost like a twin tragedy or enjoined tragedy. His relationship with Elvis was deteriorating so badly in the last few years, and what a toll that took on him as well as on Elvis. This is not a blame thing. It’s not to say this is Elvis’s fault, that this was Colonel’s fault. Each of them had his own addiction.

I feel terrible that Loanne died before it finally came out because she was so much a part of it. But anyway, I stayed with it and it worked out in the end.

One thing I don’t think a lot of people realize is how Parker had a really interesting life even before he met Elvis.

Well, you could have stopped before he met Elvis and it would still have been a truly extraordinary life and one of the most creative lives that any talent manager ever lived. I mean, the story of Eddy Arnold alone, but also with Gene Austin, trying to resurrect a broken down superstar; what Colonel did to keep Gene Austin’s career going is extraordinary in itself. Not to mention the idea of inventing your own identity. You know, after being determined to come to this country at 16, and coming in once, being thrown out, coming again later, and reinventing this life and this identity.

Why do you think he never got his citizenship? Especially later, when he knew so many influential political people. It was something he could have settled quietly.

Easily. And there’s no good reason why. I think one thing about it is it wasn’t important. There were thousands, if not tens of thousands of people in similar positions at that time who never became citizens. I just discovered, for instance, that [the artist] Willem de Kooning came from Rotterdam at exactly the same time; that’s 1926. Did not become a citizen until 1962. Traveled all over. So I don’t think it was that big a deal. And Lyndon Johnson [whom Parker knew] clearly could have done it discreetly. But I talked to Loanne about this; she didn’t understand it fully either. We both agreed that Colonel was happy to confer favors, but he didn’t like to ask for favors, and he hated to show vulnerability. So that’s the best that we could come up with. But I don’t think there’s a good answer.

During the lawsuits with Elvis Presley Enterprises in 1981 and 1982, Parker did come out and say, yes, I’m originally from Holland, my citizenship was voided after I joined the US Army, I never got US citizenship, so I’m a man with no country. In today’s climate, I thought if someone said “I’m living in the US and I’m undocumented” so openly, the next day it would be bang bang bang! There’s ICE knocking on your door. But back when he announced this, was there any kind of comment in the media about it?

It was an extraordinary revelation on a personal level; it meant nothing on a political level. It was just people were so surprised about it. The intention was to disqualify Colonel as someone who could be sued, because a person could not be sued if he was not a citizen. It’s extraordinary that Colonel at that point was willing to do it. But it seemed to give him an advantage. It was a legal dodge which never was fully tested in court, because right after that the lawsuit was settled. And, of course, Colonel, far from being held responsible, got more than the amount of money that he was suing for.

What seemed to me like a key moment for you in the Parker-Presley relationship was when Parker first sees Elvis perform in 1955 and how taken he is not necessarily with the music, but the response of the crowd. It made me feel that from the beginning he saw Elvis more as a commodity, a product.

I don’t think so at all. I think Colonel saw unlimited potential. And I don’t mean commercial potential. I mean, this was like falling in love, instantly. This was at a time when no other promoter, no other booking agent, was willing or ready to take a chance on Elvis. And you can see this in the correspondence. I mean, Colonel reached out to any number of veterans in the business and they just said, “No, this is a young, untested, unproven talent. And maybe in a few years, he’ll be great. But we’re not prepared to take a chance.”

What I think Colonel saw in Elvis, and what Elvis saw in Colonel, was a belief in a future that neither one of them could fully articulate because it didn’t exist, because Elvis was something entirely different. Colonel said this again and again, he’s entirely different from anybody else, any other entertainer or performer within his wonderful world of show business that he had ever encountered. It wasn’t like Colonel said, “Oh yeah, rock ‘n’ roll is the revolutionary thing.” It was Elvis that was the revolutionary thing. And you have to understand that Colonel was at the top, not just of the country music game, but of the entertainment game. He was the number one manager in the business, And he was prepared within weeks to bet everything on Elvis, and within months to throw over everything he had for this untried, untested, unproven talent. And just think, had the RCA Records deal not worked out, where would Colonel have been then?

The thing was that the two of them just put their full faith in each other. Elvis bought into the idea of Colonel as somebody who could take him somewhere he wanted to go. Sam Phillips said that from the start, only Colonel could deliver on Elvis’ dreams of becoming a movie star. Look at the chapter “Defending Elvis,” and there’s Colonel; he’s not trying to exploit his artist to make the most money. He’s defending his artist at every turn against every single one of the entities that they’re dealing with, against RCA, against the William Morris agency, against television, and against the movies. Just saying “My artist knows his business, and I am not going to interfere.” When Bill Bullock and Steve Sholes [from RCA Records] wrote Colonel and said, “We had an agreement you were going to do everything you could to make him into a mainstream artist,” he didn’t say, “Go fuck yourself.” He just said, “Thank you for your input,” and was not going to do a thing. And when Harry Kalcheim at the William Morris agency wrote and said, “Everyone here is upset by Elvis’s [controversial] performance on The Milton Berle Show,” Colonel said, “Well, I’m sure the public will get over it. Elvis is going to do just what he wants to do.” And that’s what he did at every stage, down the line. And that’s not somebody who’s looking to just cash in.

In writing about Elvis’s movies, you show that Parker had quite a bit of interest in the 1950s films, but then he really dropped the ball in the 1960s, and I wondered why that was.

Well, you should look at the letters from 1956 and 1957 to see how many times Colonel is writing both to Elvis and to William Morris in particular, about Elvis looking for greater artistic freedom. “Elvis wants to make straight dramatic movies. We don’t want to repeat. He’s made three movies now, they’re all similar, and he doesn’t want to keep making the same movie. He wants greater creative challenges.” And this goes on into 1960. And I think there’s two things about how the movies changed.

When Elvis came back from the army in 1960, he made two movies in a row, Flaming Star and Wild in the Country, with virtually no music. Don Siegel, a well-regarded director, directed Flaming Star. And Wild in the Country came from a literary novel by J.R. Salamanca and had Elvis playing a James Dean-type role. Now, forget about Colonel. Neither one of those films made any money. And movie studios are not anxious to make movies which don’t make money.

And the worst thing that happened was that Elvis then made Blue Hawaii and it just blew away the commercial success of every other movie right out of the water. And that basically set the standard for what every studio wanted to do, which was to recreate. It’s like the movies today; everything is about repeating. The point is, nobody could refute the success of Blue Hawaii. What the studios wanted was a Blue Hawaii, they did not want another Flaming Star or another Wild in the Country.

I’ve heard over the years that Elvis was offered the role of Tony in West Side Story, but I’ve never seen that confirmed. Did that happen?

I never saw that. Tennessee Williams did dream of Elvis appearing on stage, in Orpheus Descending. He saw Elvis’ potential for doing it. But then he recognized the reality that it was never going to happen.

So, as far as a literary script, Elvis had to settle for Clifford Odets [who wrote the screenplay for Wild in the Country] instead of Tennessee Williams. You write about the contract revision Colonel set up in 1967, which has a 50/50 split on Elvis’s earnings past his “contractual obligations.” It sounded to me like Parker was setting up a kind of insurance for himself, as his client was becoming more erratic, taking more drugs, putting on weight, not showing up at the film studio on schedule. And Parker didn’t know how to deal with this. So it seemed like from this point on, some of the deals are skewed a bit more in his favor as a kind of insurance. “I don’t know what’s going to happen with my client, so I’m going to take care of myself.”

I think that’s a good interpretation. Colonel articulated to a number of people the problems he was having with Elvis. One of the things that was operative all the way through this period, and you can see this in [Elvis’s father] Vernon’s letters to Colonel, is that Elvis’s spending was simply uncontrolled and uncontrollable. And Vernon was just beside himself. Colonel again and again found money for Elvis, such as when Graceland was on the line, you know? I mean, Elvis was on the verge of bankruptcy at a time when he was making the equivalent of $20 or $30 million [per year] today. And that was what Colonel felt he was dealing with. This was before Colonel had a gambling problem himself; that did not surface until they went to Vegas in 1969 and 1970, and then it surfaced with a vengeance.

And I wrote in the book about the temptation in that kind of situation. The 1967 contract was to reduce the amount of contractual obligations; for example, he reduced an advance from $300,000 to $200,000. And you think, why would somebody do that? Well, it means anything paid above that $200,000 is now split 50/50. That is the temptation.

And that’s why you see Colonel in 1967 sort of flirting with the idea of retiring. Managing Elvis became more and more onerous for him. If you think of their relationship as a marriage, it was a great marriage for about ten years. But each of them would have been better off if they had been able to walk away after those ten years, because it became more and more onerous on both of them. But neither one of them was prepared to walk away.

One of the most striking letters is from July 1973, Colonel writes to Elvis about the upcoming Las Vegas engagement and that he has to make it a better show, a different show. But he’s not writing in a hectoring manner, it’s “Only you know how best to work it out,” “Only you can do it,” “I am with you all the way.” He comes across as very vulnerable, and even helpless, like, “What do I do with this guy?”

Colonel believed totally in show business, the values of the show business world. It was also a world in which those who came out to see the show got something of inestimable value. And throughout, even when Elvis was touring in the 1970s, Colonel totally believed that they were creating something that meant so much to both the people who put on the show, and also to those who came out to see the show. And the underlying message of both the July 1973 letter and one he’d written the year before was “You’re selling your audience short. The people who believe in you so much, you’re selling them short.” I think you’re right in your interpretation. And if you look at the letters afterwards, from September 1973 [when Presley and Parker had a brief falling out], there’s just a sense of, what can I do? There’s nowhere else to go.

The way it’s been portrayed, Colonel’s pushing Elvis out on the road to satisfy his gambling debts. He didn’t want Elvis to go out. I mean, in those letters that he writes to [promoter] Tom Hulett, to Vernon, to [Colonel’s assistant] Tom Diskin, they just don’t know what to do. Colonel doesn’t know what to do, and he says, “I don’t know how much longer this can go on.” And it didn’t go on for much longer. After he sees Elvis in Hartford, Connecticut, on July 28, 1976, he tells Loanne, “What can I do? The real Elvis is sharp and clever, but the person I saw tonight didn’t even recognize me. No one knows how much I miss the real Elvis. If only I knew how to bring him back. I miss my friend so much.” And he’s in tears. But it’s not because he wants to exploit him.

How did that perception of Colonel develop? How did that mythology come to be created in the first place?

Until 1967, you will not find a word of criticism of Colonel. He is seen as a character, a character whom he himself created and gets a big kick out of. And he loves to play the role and loves to create the myth. Until 1967, he is perceived almost entirely positively in the press. And I think what it comes down to, and this is almost like talking about why didn’t he get citizenship, is it’s a psychological thing. Colonel believed, and he articulated this again and again and again, the artist always wears the white hat — you know, in classic Western terms. And if there’s going to be any criticism of the artist, it has to fall on the manager. And the manager wears the black hat. And I think that it’s very clear that that’s the reason he never wrote his book, the book that he proposed to write, How Much Does It Cost If It’s Free?

It’s such a great title.

It is, it is. And what he writes about it in his correspondence, he wants to write the most wonderful, the most positive view of show business that has ever been written. And not just about famous people, but also about the bell hops and hotel managers and just all kinds of people. That was the book he intended to write. What happened, as Loanne described it, he could not bring himself to say the way things really were. He couldn’t bring himself to criticize Elvis. He could have written totally positively about Elvis up to 1964. But after that, particularly in the last years, he would never have written a story which showed Elvis in a negative light. He never spoke about Elvis in a negative light. He saw that as wrong, just simply wrong.

It’s ironic. The common view of Parker was that he’s someone who just totally dominated his client. But yet, in your book, one sees that in many ways he actually didn’t have a lot of control, and that must have been frustrating to him.

He just simply didn’t know what to do. In that letter of July 1973, he tried to influence Elvis to be the person that he knew Elvis could be, to be the performer that he knew Elvis could be. And in the letters from September 1973, you can see the devastation and the hurt in Colonel’s letters. How far things have gone and how far away they were from this partnership of equals that existed at the beginning, this devotion to each other that existed at the beginning of their relationship. And yet, even in that situation, neither one could walk away. Each of them was locked into their own world and into their own addiction, and neither one of them could confront the other. For a simple reason; if one confronted the other, if he confronted Elvis, Elvis would come right back and say “Yeah, what about you?” And neither one of them could face that.

Do you feel with this book that you have a battle to combat the standard view of Parker? You’re coming out and saying “Hey, wait a minute. Look at it from this perspective.”

I didn’t want to look at it from a perspective. I wanted to look at it from the point of view of the facts, of the documents, of what actually can be shown. Of how when Elvis is going on The Ed Sullivan Show, and Sullivan had made this extraordinary turn around, after saying he wouldn’t have Elvis on his show, then offering him $50,000. And Colonel saying, “That’s all very well. But we need in the agreement that Elvis has total control of what he presents, that he has total control of the material, he has total control of his performance, and of the musicians who accompany him.” I mean, that’s not an interpretation. That’s just the way it was. Look at the letters and his actions with respect to defending Elvis, defending his artist at every turn. You can take the view that he didn’t mean any of that — that’s like taking a Trumpian view, “Well, when he said that, he actually meant the opposite.” But the point is, the information is there. I’m not trying to impose my perspective on this.

Let me say one thing. In this interview, we missed the humor. I mean, to me, that’s what’s at the at the heart, at the core, of so much of what Colonel did. In the letter he writes to [journalist] Paul Wilder in 1960, he says “It is of course these funny letters and my feeling that one must enjoy his work or grow stale keeps me on the go.” What would be the point of any of this without the enjoyment we derive from it? Which is exactly the same as what Sam Phillips said; if it ain’t fun, it’s not worth doing. And that was the Colonel’s whole perspective. And he just was one of the most positive people that you could ever find and just this total life force.

And that isn’t to say that he’s a person without faults. Nobody’s without faults. I just hope that people can read this with an open mind, and that it’ll change some people’s views. Because the story that so many people have believed they know is not the actual story. And I’m sure that there will be some people who will say, “How could this guy say this? What a total sellout!” But I didn’t go into this either to defend or to excoriate anybody. I felt strongly that Colonel had simply had never gotten his due, at least not in the last 30 or 40 years.

Just as with Elvis. I mean, when I wrote about Elvis in Last Train to Memphis so many people saw him as a puppet; Sam Phillips discovered him, he was Colonel’s puppet, he did what other people told him to do. And I tried to portray someone that I saw so strongly as a conscious, creative artist, somebody who created his own music; there could never have been anybody more committed to his music than Elvis or somebody who developed more than Elvis. I mean, you can see it in the early TV performances between the first two US appearances and the sixth. You can see how much he’s developed by the time he appears on Ed Sullivan a year later, he’s a different performer, because he has that capacity for growth. Which I think is what Colonel saw in him. And it’s the same thing for me with Colonel. I think as great and as creative and as inventive as Elvis and Sam Phillips were in what they did, I think Colonel was just as creative and just as original in what he did. And so I hope people can at least modify their views somewhat if they read the book.

For info on Peter Guralnick’s personal appearances promoting The Colonel and The King, check his website for details.