CHAPTER 7
A cross between P. T. Barnum and W. C. Fields, Colonel Tom Parker was like his most famous client—bigger than life. As such, much of Colonel’s personal history is half fabrication, half colorful fact. The basic biography Parker handed out in the fifties had him born of carny parents in West Virginia on June 26, 1909, orphaned at age ten, and soon after going to work for his uncle’s Great Parker Pony Circus.
From there, the trail gets easier to trace. After army duty, Parker joined the Royal American Shows, a higher-class outfit than most carnivals since it traveled by rail rather than by truck. Parker worked the “pie car” with the organization, feeding the carny crew between towns. When the train pulled into Tampa, the carnival’s headquarters, Parker threw up a “mitt camp” to teach the palm readers their trade.
Parker was still living in Tampa in the early forties, working for the humane society and doing a little promoting on the side, often bringing in country music stars from Nashville. One of the shows he booked was Pee Wee King and the Golden West Cowboys, with Minnie Pearl and Eddy Arnold. Parker signed on as King’s road manager for four years, but he especially liked the smooth-voiced Arnold, and when “The Tennessee Plowboy” left King’s show, Parker became his personal manager.
“Colonel was one of the most energetic men I’ve ever seen,” remembers King. “Regardless of how big the crowds or advance sales were, he always tried to get bigger crowds. He was always very considerate and good to the entertainers, and no matter who he managed, he did a tremendous job. He knew what he wanted, he had his own way of getting there, and if he made any mistakes, they were well covered. Everything he got credit for, he did on his own.”
While Parker was easygoing and conscientious, King also remembers that Colonel would bargain for radio time and newspaper ads, and even with the auditorium managers. “Besides getting the ticket money,” says King, “he’d ask for a cut in the concessions. So Tom had a way.”
Part of Parker’s “way” was to indulge in some of the most outrageous stunts in show business history. One of the most ingenious revolved around a pair of dancing chickens. As recounted in Jerry Hopkins’s Elvis: A Biography:
“Country singers long have performed at rodeos and livestock shows, and in those days there was a $20 entertainment tax charged per performance unless you had a livestock exhibit, so the Colonel would carry a hog or a couple of chickens in the back of his car, put them in a box outside where Eddy sang and mark it ‘Livestock Exhibit,’ thereby saving the 20 bucks.
“The Colonel was traveling with two chickens when Eddy was too sick to appear, and so he went to the stock show’s producer and said he had a substitute act, Colonel Parker’s Dancing Chickens. As the Colonel tells the story, he sent his assistant to the nearest general store to buy a two-dollar hot plate and an extension cord, which he placed in the chicken cage and covered with straw.
“The hot plate was plugged in, Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys went into ‘Turkey in the Straw,’ the curtain went up, and a bewildered audience saw two chickens high-stepping around the cage, trying to keep from burning their feet. The Colonel says he got away with this for two days, two shows per day, until Eddy was able to sing again.”
Parker and Arnold split up in the early fifties, and although Parker had previously promoted the pop crooner Gene Austin (“My Blue Heaven”) and managed several other acts besides Arnold (including the Dickens Sisters—relatives of a Parker employee—who toured and recorded with King), he devoted most of his energies to one performer at a time. In 1954, after a short stint managing country/bluegrass performer Mac Wiseman, he signed Canada’s Hank Snow, already a star and a member of “The Grand Ole Opry” for four years. Soon after, Parker met Elvis Presley.
When Parker and Presley first signed their contract, Colonel promised Elvis he’d turn his $1 million worth of talent into $1 million. Within thirteen months, Colonel made good on his pledge.
BILLY SMITH: Colonel’s relationship with Elvis . . . Boy, that’s a complicated tale. Elvis was doing fairly good from ’54 to ’55. But when the Colonel came along, bang! Instant success! Elvis had money, he had women running after him, he had mass popularity, he was on television and signing movie deals. And he had his picture everywhere you looked.
Colonel did that for him, and they got along fine. He lived up to his word to Elvis’s mama and daddy. And just about all the things he accomplished were unheard of at the time. Colonel vowed to keep it going, and, in return, he was saying, “You’ve got my loyalty. Now I want yours.” Elvis was easily swayed by the Colonel, and his loyalty continued right to the end. But Colonel was cunning, and he knew how to manipulate Elvis, too.
LAMAR FIKE: Elvis’s greatest flaw, and his fatal flaw, was his loyalty.
MARTY LACKER: Sometimes, in the early days, Colonel would say to Elvis, “You are like a son to me, and I love you.” I think everybody believed it at the time. Arnold and Snow got wise to him in a way that Elvis never did. But for decades, neither one of them would talk about him and then only Snow did, in his book, The Hank Snow Story. Fear of retaliation, maybe. That was Colonel’s deal—control.
LAMAR FIKE: What happened to Colonel was a unique situation. In our business, when a manager and artist click it’s phenomenal. Like Erv Woolsey with George Strait, who’ve been together for more than ten years. The Colonel looked at the gold mine he had, and went, “Uh-huh,” and tied up all the loose ends. He was fortunate in that Elvis was so malleable. Colonel was one lucky manager. His favorite saying was “If you can’t operate from a position of strength, do not operate.”
MARTY LACKER: From the beginning, Colonel instilled in Elvis the importance of being a nice, polite person. Colonel said, “You don’t make waves, and you don’t make promoters mad.” And later on, when they got into the movies, he told Elvis not to rile the Hollywood people. He said, “You do everything they say. If you’re going to sign a contract, you do exactly what they want, no matter what they do to you. If you do anything wrong, they’ll ruin your career and you’ll go back to being just a poor kid again.”
Of course, because of his carnival background, Colonel viewed most people as suckers. He didn’t really give a damn about anybody. Basically, he looked at people for what they could do for him.
LAMAR FIKE: What happened to Tom Parker is what every manager wants—one big superstar. And it made him a very wealthy man. Elvis made an average of $7 to $15 million a year in sixties and seventies monies. Colonel had 25 to 50 percent of it. That’s not bad. And, of course, after Elvis died, he made a lot more money. A lot. But then he gambled a lot of it away, too. Carnies are also gamblers—they can’t resist their own shell game.
MARTY LACKER: Once a carny, always a carny. Do you remember the Elvis Presley Midget Fan Club? Right after Colonel took over as Elvis’s manager, he pulled this publicity stunt to advertise one of Elvis’s concerts. He hired a bunch of midgets to parade around the streets wearing little suits and carrying banners that promoted the fan club and the concert. He did that with elephants, too. He loved elephants, of course. That comes from his carnival time. He collected them. If Elvis was going to buy the Colonel a gift, he’d get him something with an elephant on it. But Colonel always liked midgets.
One time . . . what the hell was the occasion? It was in Hawaii. He went on the radio, or advertised, that the first authentic, full-blooded Hawaiian midget who showed up at the radio station would get free tickets to the show. Well, there are very few full-blooded Hawaiians left, and there sure as hell aren’t many midgets. Colonel never gave anything away.
LAMAR FIKE: The con started a long time ago, and it’s never stopped. Even the military title. Colonel was stationed in Hawaii in the army. As a private, he served two years in an antiaircraft section of the coastal artillery at Fort Shafter, Hawaii, which is right outside Honolulu. I think that’s why he had Elvis make Blue Hawaii. Anyway, when he couldn’t get a hotel room, he’d get on the phone and say, “Colonel Parker’s coming.” Because army personnel would get a hotel room before civilians. That’s how the “Colonel” bit started. Later on, in ’48, I think, he got an honorary Colonel certification from Governor Jimmie Davis and the State of Louisiana. Davis, of course, had been a country music singer.
BILLY SMITH: Colonel could snow anybody. That’s what he called himself, you know. “The Snowman.” During the movie years, Hal Wallis called him “America’s Number One Snow Man.” Colonel even had a bigger-than-life-size snowman in his office out at the sound lot at Paramount. And he had little certificates printed up that said “Snowmens [sic] League of America,” a take off on the Showman’s League of America, with a drawing of himself as a snowman, with the hat and the gloves and the cigar.
MARTY LACKER: Oh, yeah, I remember that. All the original Memphis Mafia got membership cards and a rule book. It had blank pages.
LAMAR FIKE: Never before or since has anybody ever been put together the way Colonel put Elvis together. Colonel is a genius. He would go in and buy thirty-second radio spots on Elvis to advertise his show. They’d go, “Elvis, Elvis, Elvis,” with an echo, a three-second delay. That’s all it was. Then the voice-over would say, “Appearing in such-and-such city. Tickets—” Very effective.
BILLY SMITH: Once Colonel had Elvis established, he didn’t want to overexpose him.
LAMAR FIKE: “You give a kid a candy bar every day, and he gets tired of it.” That’s the way Colonel thought.
MARTY LACKER: Even though you saw Elvis’s picture everywhere, in some ways he was underexposed. For example, Colonel wouldn’t allow him to play New York City at the height of his early fame. He kept him playing small towns because Colonel wanted sellout crowds. He thought if he didn’t have a sellout, it would be an embarrassment. The act wouldn’t live up to the image. Which is ridiculous. Because if they liked Elvis in L.A., and they liked him in Oshkosh, why wouldn’t they like him in New York? But Colonel also thought he couldn’t get the same cooperation from the police in New York for security.
BILLY SMITH: People always want to know whether Colonel told Elvis to hide himself away from the public. In the beginning, at least, he said, “Remain a mystery.” And rationing Elvis worked out at first. The press would want an interview, and Colonel would quote some outlandish price and say, “You pay this much money, you get an interview.” So people wanted it all that much more.
But then when Elvis’s fame became pressure and the fans became so rowdy—which was right from the start, almost—Elvis built a shell around himself with the guys who were the forerunners of the Memphis Mafia. And he stayed in that shell because he was afraid to get out and walk the street by himself. Colonel encouraged it. I just don’t think anybody knew how unhealthy it could get.
LAMAR FIKE: When you’re a manager, and you have an artist like Elvis, you do what you can to keep him at a premium. And to hold on to him.
BILLY SMITH: Elvis respected Colonel, especially in the early days. He looked up to him and to his mama—not his daddy. He thought, “They’re teaching me things, and they’re watching out for me.” But he couldn’t talk to the Colonel about his personal life because they kept business as business, and that was it. Except the Colonel told him not to get married. He said, “In due time, if you want to get married, fine. But right now, don’t get serious with anybody because your career is taking off. You need to dedicate yourself to that.” I’m sure Colonel didn’t want to risk disappointing all those teenage girls who dreamed about Elvis.
LAMAR FIKE: Colonel was a personal manager, not a business manager. There was no real business manager, although Vernon would pretend to be one after a while. The checks would come in to the Colonel, he would take his percentage out, and he would send the money on to Elvis. That’s the way they did it, and that’s the way managers do it today.
BILLY SMITH: Let me give you a little something here. Elvis looked at Colonel like he was a mentor. And the teacher is always the smartest and is always right. So consequently, Elvis trusted Colonel with the money and the ability to make the right business decisions for him. And Elvis didn’t want to be a businessman, and he didn’t think he had to be, because he respected Colonel. Now we know he should have learned more about the business. Not until his final few years did Elvis really break down and realize what was happening. But even then, he had such a loyalty to Colonel that he let it go on just like it was.
MARTY LACKER: The student/teacher comparison is pretty apt. The thing is, there are good teachers who really have the benefit of the student at heart, and then there are those who take advantage.
BILLY SMITH: In the beginning, Colonel had Elvis’s benefit at heart. But just like Elvis, the Colonel changed. People get greedy.
LAMAR FIKE: When the Colonel signed deals, he would discuss them with Elvis first. Well, in a fashion he would discuss things with Elvis. But he would never ask Elvis’s permission. He would just say, “Do you want to do it?” Elvis would say, “Yeah.” And then Colonel would go make the deal. The important thing is that Colonel had total freedom to make any deal he wanted. Elvis would say, “Take care of it. Bring me the paper, I’ll sign it and go do the show.” Elvis signed the contracts blind. He didn’t know what they were. He just signed them. But Elvis signed too many contracts without looking at them. Then, too, early on, I don’t think the Colonel did anything to cause Elvis to distrust him. Colonel’s flamboyance was probably a problem at times, though. Because the Colonel was as big a character as Elvis.
BILLY SMITH: The Colonel was putting on a show in his own way. He had an ego, too. And he fed it, in the things he said, the people he kept around him, and the way he looked. He was always a contradiction and a mystery. I thought it was funny that he would sometimes wear an undershirt in public. He didn’t do it all that much. Once in a great, great while and then mostly in the office. Because Colonel was a showman. He played that promoter image to the fullest, and he dressed the part. He loved it. Power and authority were his whole life. He was married, but she was usually in Nashville or Palm Springs, and he was in Los Angeles or on the road for Elvis. They didn’t have any kids, except for her son by a previous marriage. His name was Bobby. He had multiple sclerosis. Died the same year as Elvis.
LAMAR FIKE: Colonel’s wife was named Marie, so he called her “Miz Rie,” you know, “misery.”
MARTY LACKER: Mrs. Parker didn’t go along on trips very often. She hated everything. Colonel would do his little duty and call her every day and ask about the cats. They had cats at the Palm Springs house, and she had her favorite, Midnight. In the early years, especially, Colonel would go back to Palm Springs on the weekends.
LAMAR FIKE: Colonel met Marie and fell in love with her while they were working the pie car on the carnival train. He knew every trick in the book. When they’d set up the stands to sell foot-long hot dogs at the carnival, Colonel would stick about an inch of wiener in each end, and then fill the middle with slaw. Then he put a whole wiener—minus the ends—down on the ground in front of the stand. If anybody came back and complained that Colonel had cheated him, Colonel would puff up and say he hadn’t done anything of the sort. Then he’d point down at the ground and say, “There! You must have dropped it.”
Colonel might have had a soft spot for elephants, but he didn’t give a shit about this cat of Marie’s, Midnight. And Marie just doted on it. I was at the house one day, and Colonel and I were sitting in the den, talking. Marie came in all distraught and said, “Midnight’s on the roof! Midnight’s on the roof!” Colonel said, “He’ll come down.”
She came back in a little while and said, “Midnight’s still on the roof! Do something!” So Colonel went out with a hose about as big as a fireman’s, with tremendous pressure, and aimed it at that cat, and blew it over the garage and the porte cochere, and out into the street. It landed on its feet, but boy, was it surprised! Colonel came back in, and he said, “Now, that’s how you get a cat off a roof.”
After a while, Elvis found it hard to get along with the Colonel. They were friends, but at arm’s length. Elvis always called him “the Admiral,” just to be different. And Colonel always called him Elvis, except when he was discussing him with somebody else. Then he referred to him as “Mr. Presley.” Or sometimes as “My Boy.” But Elvis had his world, and the Colonel had his.
Managers usually subjugate themselves to the artist. But Colonel never did that. He always considered himself an equal. Consequently, both Colonel and Elvis had their own entourage. Elvis eventually had a thick wall of people around him who were terribly loyal, but the same thing existed in Colonel’s camp. They were just older in Colonel’s camp. And both camps operated from the simple premise that one was the star and the others were the underlings.
Colonel established this pattern from way back. The camps lived and traveled the same way, with the private jets, the hotel rooms, and people waiting on them hand and foot. That was one of the most amazing things to me. Elvis would get pissed off about Colonel and his camp. It was hilarious.
MARTY LACKER: Colonel’s camp was an interesting crew. For years, his whole office was men, even the secretary. While I knew him, he didn’t have a woman around him until the seventies, and then only one, Miss Miller. Loanne Miller. He always gave the impression that he didn’t like women around, as far as business was concerned. He didn’t like them meddling in the business or into anybody’s affairs.
I saw a woman with a heavy Viennese accent named Trude Forsher in one documentary [Elvis in Hollywood], identified as Colonel’s assistant. She was related to the Aberbachs in some way. She’s supposed to have been Colonel’s West Coast secretary. But I think she was really only there in Elvis’s prearmy days, from Love Me Tender through King Creole.
LAMAR FIKE: Colonel had a core group, just as Elvis would come to have one. Tom Diskin was the Colonel’s right-hand man, his Best Boy, or whatever you want to call it. He did everything. Colonel had a male secretary named Jim O’Brien. George Parkhill, from RCA, was part of this outfit, too. Then there was Bitsy Mott, who was Colonel’s brother-in-law. Bitsy had been an infielder for the Philadelphia Phillies. He would be in and out, back in the mid- to late fifties. His real first name was Elisha.
MARTY LACKER: Bitsy Mott was almost the forerunner of the Memphis Mafia. Some of the books even say he was a member. But he wasn’t, really. He traveled as a bodyguard, up until the time Elvis went into the army. Back in the early years, the Colonel was always at Elvis’s side when they went anywhere. And so was Bitsy. But Bitsy worked for the Colonel. He didn’t work for Elvis. He ended up with bit parts in some of the movies—played a soldier in G.I. Blues and a state trooper in Wild in the Country.
Somebody asked me the other day if these guys who worked for Colonel saw him as a father figure. I don’t know. Because quite honestly, we weren’t around Colonel that much. Personally, I don’t understand how anybody could feel any warmth for him. And I don’t know what those guys thought or why they were there. Or what they did when they weren’t with Colonel. Most of them weren’t married. At least, not at the time.
LAMAR FIKE: Colonel ran his camp with military decorum. Sometimes it got a little like Dr. Strangelove.
MARTY LACKER: Colonel would tell these guys what to do, and then he’d say, “That’s an order!” He and Tom Diskin had been together a long time. Yet if Colonel wanted him, he wouldn’t say, “Tom.” He’d bark, “Diskin!” It made no difference who was in the office. A lot of times, Parker would say something to somebody, and then he’d say, “Isn’t that right, Diskin?” And Diskin would parrot, “That’s right, Colonel!”
LAMAR FIKE: The way Colonel’s men barked these silly replies to him on cue . . . it was comical, but pathetic.
MARTY LACKER: I don’t know why these guys put up with his bullshit. Maybe they didn’t have any other place to go. Tom Diskin was a smart man, especially in financial matters. I don’t know if he’s the guy who worked out all the percentages with the Hill and Range publishing companies and all of Colonel’s other deals. But even though Diskin had a lot of money put away from his investments, he still hung in there with Colonel. Jim O’Brien, the secretary, seemed to be very intelligent. And he would take all this crap from the Colonel. He was very quiet. Now these other guys who were around him, they were like carnies. They were all there for a hustle.
Later on, when the Memphis Mafia was in full swing, Colonel tried to get Elvis’s crew to answer to him like that. Alan Fortas used to, and Joe Esposito would at times. Red West never would, but sometimes Sonny West would, because Sonny used to go along with the Colonel’s stuff just to be going along with it. But Sonny wasn’t fooled by him.
LAMAR FIKE: I guess I knew Colonel as well as anybody who’s ever known him. And he was always a very odd duck. We would be in a restaurant, and if a waitress tried to put her hand on him, or accidentally hit his arm, he’d snap, “Don’t touch me.”
MARTY LACKER: He didn’t like anybody touching him. Period. On one or two occasions, I saw the Colonel and Elvis hug, but that was Elvis’s doing. Parker was odd in a lot of ways. He’d talk out of the side of his mouth, for example. I mean, literally. He’d twist it and turn it into a little pocket of a mouth. Probably because he always had a cigar in it.
LAMAR FIKE: Parker had a bad back and used a cane a lot. But it became so much a part of him that whether his back hurt or not, he used it. He always wore an elastic brace around his waist and the upper part of his back. Of course, Colonel was very overweight. God, he could eat. Ate like a moose. Jesus. Except when he got free food off of people, everything he ate was a boiled dinner. A circus dinner. He always wanted to teach me how to do it. In the carnival, they used to take everything and put it in a big pot. Slumgullion. Boiled. And he liked to barbecue stuff. He had a cookhouse out in the back of his house in Palm Springs. It was a barbecue pit with a house built around it, and it had a big walk-in freezer in the back.
When we’d stay in hotels, he’d get a bunch of free dinners and put them on the jet back to Palm Springs. When we got off the plane, he’d say to the luggage handlers, “Would you rather have a ten-dollar tip or a nice meal from a hotel?” They’d take the meal, thinking they were going to get a big feast. And he’d hand them this tray. That way, he wouldn’t have to tip them and the meal didn’t cost him anything. He loved to do stuff like that. Just to see if he could get away with it.
MARTY LACKER: Colonel used the cane as a prop, to get sympathy, like “Oh, poor old Colonel. He can’t lift this. He can’t lift that.” I don’t think he needed that cane, except to raise it and threaten people when he got mad. He did that to me one time, but after I told him off, he never did it again.
LAMAR FIKE: We always thought Colonel was the classic eccentric. There was something uniquely American about him, you know, the self-made millionaire iconoclast. In 1978, when I was doing the book with Albert Goldman, [publisher] Kevin Eggers called me and said a guy in New York had told him about an obscure book called The Hillbilly Cat. Kevin alerted Albert to it. Kevin told me, “Lamar, this book is by a guy named Hans Langbroek. And it says that the Colonel is a Dutch citizen.” I said, “You’re kidding.” He said, “No, he’s from Breda, Holland.” I said, “I’ll track it down.” So he sent the book to me. And he wrote to Breda and got some articles by a reporter named Dirk Vellenga. The articles also said Colonel was Dutch. Dirk eventually wrote a book called Elvis and the Colonel, based on his research.
I was managing a country singer named Billie Jo Spears, and we were going to Europe. So I caught the train to Amsterdam, and I changed trains and went to Breda. That was the strangest feeling, being on that train, going to meet some guy that I didn’t know was for real or not, but feeling like I was about to discover something kind of monumental. Because at first I thought this was probably bullshit. I never suspected Colonel was a foreigner. But the more I thought about it, the more I began to believe it. Because I never understood his accent. Colonel would speak in what I thought was a little German that he’d learned somewhere. And all he was doing was speaking his native tongue. He would rip it out at me. But when he spoke English, he couldn’t pronounce his “R’s,” which is typical of Dutch or German pronunciation problems. I just thought he had a speech impediment. So I told Kevin Eggers and Albert, “You know, I think there’s something here.”
I got to Breda, and Dirk met me at the train and took me over to Colonel Parker’s sister’s house. She walked into the room, and I went into absolute shock. I couldn’t believe it. She looked just like Tom Parker. She showed me pictures of the Colonel when he was a kid and showed pictures of one of his brothers.
When you’re sitting there talking to a guy’s sister who looks just like him and she’s Dutch, and she doesn’t speak a word of English, it just blows you away. I sat there looking at her and the pictures, and I went, “Holy shit, this is another man!” It’s like finding out that your all-American father is really Latvian and has three wives in the old country. I said, “What in God’s name? Where did Tom Parker come from?”
His real name is Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk, which is pronounced “von Kick.” They called him Dries, for short. He was born June 26, 1909, like he said, but that’s about all that’s the truth. He jumped ship, not once, but twice. He came over here the first time at age seventeen or so, and then again maybe a year later, and enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1929. You wouldn’t think he’d want to be in the army, but his father had been in the military for a while, before he became a livery man and tended horses. In Breda, military officers were highly respected because Breda had been a fortress town for centuries. And Colonel’s family didn’t command much of anything—they lived over a stable. Colonel served in the U.S. Army until he was discharged in about ’31.
Most people think Colonel took the name of Tom Parker from a guy who had a pony show. Dirk Vellenga says that when Colonel enlisted in the army—claiming to be an orphan—the captain who interviewed him was named Thomas Parker. Apparently, Colonel, who was still going by Andreas van Kuijk, or Dries, just stole Parker’s name and put an “Andrew” in the middle to represent his past.
The carnival stuff was after the army, too. He worked as an advance man, drumming up publicity in all these little towns in the South. He joined the Johnny J. Jones Exposition and then the Royal American shows in about ’35. In the forties, he settled down some. He ran the animal shelter in Tampa—he was the dogcatcher. And he’d hire elephants and all these exotic animals whenever a new department store opened in town. He knew how to draw out the customers. Somewhere along the line—probably during this same time—he worked as a department-store Santa Claus. That’s why he later liked to dress up as Santa on Elvis’s Christmas cards.
Discovering a man I had known almost all my life was not who he said he was just astounded me. It has to be one of the most shocking things in my existence. The only thing that could have been more shocking was to find out that Elvis didn’t really die, that he’s alive somewhere, like some of these idiots want to believe. It totally freaked me out.
I got back to Amsterdam that night, and I called Albert. I said, “You won’t believe this.” Then I took the Concorde and flew back to New York to meet with him. Albert said, “Why don’t you call the Colonel?” So I called him, and he answered. I said, “Why didn’t you tell me you were Andreas van Kuijk?” And he said, “You never asked me.” I said, “You lived your life as a sham!” He said, “Lamar, I’m a carny.”
But then he tried to smooth it over. He said, “Well, my brother, Ad, came over here to visit me. He met Elvis in Hollywood. Elvis knew.” I said, “Bullshit, Colonel.” I said, “He never met your brother.” So he hung up on me. But I’m certain Elvis didn’t know. If he’d known, we would have found out. Because Elvis could rarely keep a secret. He would ask you to keep a secret so he could tell everybody first. And he couldn’t have waited to tell us that the Colonel was Dutch.
After that phone call, I really started tracking him. I got into the army files through the Freedom of Information Act and traced his records to a warehouse in Tampa, Florida. But his file was missing. Whether it had been stolen, I don’t know. But it was gone.
The Goldman book was the first to really expose Colonel’s citizenship. But it came in handy for him when the estate got on his ass in the eighties. He filed legal papers that said since he served in the U.S. Army without the permission of the Dutch government, he automatically forfeited his Dutch citizenship. So since he wasn’t a citizen of the U.S., and never became a naturalized citizen, he was a man without a country. Try suing a man in a federal court that has no jurisdiction over him!
MARTY LACKER: The real question is why he kept it quiet so long. After he had been here for decades.
LAMAR FIKE: I don’t know what Colonel was afraid of. He paid his taxes on time, and after the IRS got on his ass once in the early years, he took hardly any deductions. He had Elvis do the same thing. Their tax policy was just horrible. I guess he was afraid they’d ship him back to Holland. I don’t imagine he wanted to go.
MARTY LACKER: I was told that before Colonel’s mother died in Holland, one of his brothers contacted him and said, “Your mother is dying.” He never sent a get-well card, or flowers, or made a call or anything. He totally turned his back on that situation, from about 1932 on. And why not? He wasn’t that guy anymore. He had reinvented himself. The old shell game again.
LAMAR FIKE: Colonel is one of the real legends. Not only of show business, but of international hucksterism. But most of the guys who worked for Elvis couldn’t stand him. Couldn’t stand his pettiness and the way he loved to play head games. Alan Fortas loved him. He thought Colonel was magic. Thought he hung the moon, especially with what he did for Elvis. And in the early days, the Colonel did do a hell of a job. But then, time passes, and the old shit doesn’t work anymore. Some of the guys still talk to him. But we don’t talk. Everybody says, “The Colonel this, the Colonel that.” The Colonel’s full of shit. He’s an asshole. He really is. To me, he’s a miserable old bastard.