The Ringmaster of Rock
In 1982, a bootleg record titled Elvis’ Greatest Shit!! caused a stir by savaging the crass commercialization and cultural deification of Presley in the wake of his death five years before. It was released on the Dog Vomit label, emblazoned with RCA mascot Nipper retching into a gramophone, a dig at the venerable label that had repackaged the King’s songs in a relentless posthumous cash grab. The bootleg featured the worst dreck from Elvis’s schlock-movie career in the ’60s, songs like “Do the Clambake,” “Queenie Wahine’s Papaya,” and “Dominic the Impotent Bull.”
The album cover featured the ghoulish photo of Presley in his casket that had run in the National Enquirer tabloid. Inside was a Xerox copy of a prescription by Presley’s pill-pushing physician Dr. Nick, one of many enablers in Elvis’s grisly decline. On the back, the credits included this cryptic tidbit: “Personal Management: Andreas C. Van Kuijk,” the real name of Presley’s longtime manager, Colonel Tom Parker.
It was the bootlegger’s way of unmasking the imposter who, for many, had become the chief villain in the Elvis saga, famous for his defiant remark after Presley’s death at 42, “It’s still Elvis and the Colonel.” No wonder he was regarded as a cigar-chomping charlatan and good-ol-boy-grifter who exploited his client, milking Presley of his earnings and sabotaging his artistry. It is an image that persists, most recently in the cartoonish portrayal by Tom Hanks of Parker as a sinister and greedy ogre in the 2022 Elvis biopic that was a global blockbuster.
Renowned Presley biographer Peter Guralnick offers The Colonel and the King as a 600-page corrective. In his telling, Parker is the unjustly reviled half of “the partnership that rocked the world,” and, just as important, a bona fide “American original” and showbiz visionary who created the concept of the modern, multimedia megastar. Not just a manager, Parker was a direct live-wire conduit to the mass adulation that made Presley’s success possible.
The book explores the symbiotic and ultimately toxic dynamic between one of pop culture’s oddest odd couples: the illegal immigrant from Europe’s unwashed masses and the native son of the American South. Guralnick challenges the conventional narrative of Parker as predatory ex-carny with Elvis the gullible rube as his mark. He knows it’s a tough sell and asks readers to appreciate the pair’s shared Quixotic ambition, to “surrender yourself, if you can, to their unremediated dreams, set aside the myths that have grown up around them both.”
An unabashed admirer of Parker, Guralnick got to know the aging Colonel as a key guide to elusive interview sources while researching his two-volume chronicle of Presley. To bolster his case, Guralnick presents a large cache of previously unpublished correspondence spanning 22 heady years of Parker’s tenure managing Elvis. He quotes extensively from the letters “to present Colonel in the same freewheeling spirit he presented himself.”
As the title suggests, the Colonel gets top billing. Guralnick traces the early murky years of “Dries,” as Andreas was known to his working-class Dutch kin. As a boy he was a habitual runaway enamored with traveling circuses. As a teen he made his escape to the United States in the 1920s and joined the carnies and circus people who became his surrogate family. He was Americanized in the Dixie-fried underbelly of cheap thrills, patent medicines, and peep shows. A born hustler, he honed his promotional skills and learned the fine art of hype, pasting “DON’T MISS IT” posters for coming attractions.
He renamed himself Thomas Parker and added the honorary title of Colonel to solidify his status in Southern showbiz circles. It was a self-invented persona he fiercely protected all his life. By the time he first saw Elvis perform, in early 1955, he was working as the manager for country star Hank Snow. It was the frenzied crowd reaction more than Presley’s raw rockabilly that sold Parker.
Guralnick shows how the Colonel was the first to see the 20-year-old singer as a world-conquering cultural phenomenon with a promise of longevity. “This artist seems to me to be right in line for motion picture material, television, and a stage career,” he wrote to the William Morris Agency not long afterward. “The talents that are hidden in this personality are unlimited.”
As Elvis’s manager, the Colonel became a conduit between his “boy,” as he often referred to him in the early years, and fame well beyond the Southern country-music circuit where he’d found him. For Elvis, the Colonel, which was how he always addressed Parker, was like family. “Believe me when I say I will stick with you thru thick and thin and do everything I can to uphold your faith in me,” Elvis telegrammed after Parker had secured the landmark record deal with RCA in 1956. “Again I say thanks and I love you like a father.” Parker preferred to characterize their relationship as a pair of kindred spirits that fate brought together. “I know that you understand me better than any-one for you have a very carefull [sic] Eye,” he wrote back to Elvis. “I am a great deal like you, very sensitive … .”
When an early backlash branded Elvis as a menace to society, with protesters burning and hanging him in effigy, Parker was his staunch defender. He also began to deftly calibrate his client’s image, extolling the polite God-fearing mama’s boy inside the feral hillbilly cat. Elvis’s stint in the Army in the late ’50s furthered his acceptance with mainstream America. Most important, Parker preserved Elvis’s mystique early on by limiting his TV appearances, interviews, and concerts, as he flooded the market with merch, shielding his star from overexposure.
Parker is revealed as an expert hard bargainer who cut epic big money deals for his client from cutthroat record and movie execs. In his massive business correspondence, he befriends his slick corporate adversaries, charming them with folksy humor and shipments of country sausage. As the letters also make clear, Parker held the purse strings but gave Presley full creative control. It was Elvis as much as Parker who wanted to be a Brando-caliber movie star. But his string of such films as Fun in Acapulco, embarrassing as they were, proved box office hits that kept him typecast as a singing celebrity, not a serious actor. As for the notorious 50-50 split Parker enjoyed with his client, Guralnick lets the Colonel try to explain, but in most respects it wasn’t a justifiable financial arrangement.
The later years saw several commercial and artistic achievements, including the legendary ’68 TV Comeback Special; the triumphant 1969 debut of his longstanding Las Vegas residency, and his seminal 1973 Aloha from Hawaii via Satellite concert broadcast via satellite across the globe—all of which saw the Colonel back in his element as master promoter and tour organizer. But the partnership deteriorated, with both sliding into addictions (for Parker it was gambling, for Elvis it was pills). The Colonel’s letters and phone calls to his client began to go unanswered as Elvis was now closed off from everyone except his entourage.
Parker lived 20 years after the death of Elvis, dying at age 87 in 1997. He never had another client, telling his wife, Loanne, “It will always be Elvis and the Colonel. I’ll never stop trying to keep his name alive.”
One could quibble with Guralnick’s decision to include a 250-page addendum of Parker’s voluminous and unfiltered business letters, many in full, with Guralnick’s commentary; it does lend the book the bloated heft of Vegas-era Elvis.
But leafing through its contents—several reproduced as they appeared on Parker’s personal stationery typed in breathless ALL-CAPS—one finds many nuggets of 20th-century deal-making folk wisdom. The sheer energy and exuberance make it worth preservation. These may not take a place on the shelf next to The Letters of John and Abigail Adams, but, like Guralnick’s passionate apologetic itself, make an important addition to the ever-expanding library of Presleyiana.
The Colonel and the King: Tom Parker, Elvis Presley, and the Partnership that Rocked the World
by Peter Guralnick
Little, Brown and Company, 624 pp., $38
Eddie Dean is the coauthor of Dr. Ralph Stanley’s Man of Constant Sorrow: My Life and Times.
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