DURING his years of caring for Tampa’s displaced pets, Parker spun off the career that would eventually lead him out of Florida and up to Tennessee—that of a country music concert promoter, booking Grand Ole Opry stars out of Nashville. He started in 1941 as the nation went to war, mostly to earn money for the Humane Society. Parker knew nothing about country-and-western music, with its predominant themes of Mother, death, and the lamentable wages of sin, preferring the sentimental crooning of Gene Austin to the nasal whine of Nashville. But he’d had it on good authority that hillbilly was the music of the common man, in this case, the Florida farmers and working class, who revered the Opry stars as something close to demigods. And so, with a sliver of the proceeds going to the war effort, Parker and two partners rented the great, sprawling Fort Homer W. Hesterly National Guard Armory, a recently completed WPA project on Howard Avenue.
Parker’s first venture into concert promotion starred the future “King of the Hillbillies” (later changed to “the King of Country Music”), Roy Acuff, and a new comic named Minnie Pearl, who had just joined the Grand Ole Opry in November 1940. That December, she started on the road with Acuff at $50 a week, but only under the directive that she abbreviate her opening patter: “How-dee! I’m just so proud to be here! I’m so proud I could come!” Acuff, the son of a Baptist preacher, got drunk on occasion, but once he became the Opry’s first network radio host in 1939, he kept his professional image clean as a cat’s paw. And so he took his “extra added attraction” aside and spoke in low tones. “Minnie, you’ll have to leave off that last part. It’s just too suggestive.”
A twenty-nine-year-old college-educated actress, Pearl, née Sarah Ophelia Colley, was the daughter of a prosperous Tennessee lumber man who’d lost his fortune in the crash of ’29. Although the cultured Colley had traveled the Deep South organizing amateur productions of drama and musical comedy—that was where she’d gleaned the inspiration for the character of Minnie Pearl, the country girl in the Mary Janes with
an eye toward “ketchin’ fellers”—the country music world seemed like a sideshow in comparison. Pearl could hardly believe the lackadaisical way the community lived and conducted its business.
“When I came along,” she remembered, “nobody owned their home. They lived in trailers or rooming houses. Nobody had any insurance, and very few of them had bank accounts. They carried all the money they had with them. When one of ’em got ready to buy a house, the real estate man would say, ‘How do you intend to take care of this?’ And they’d say, ‘Will cash do?’ They had no idea how big this thing was going to be.”
In contrast, Pearl discovered, Parker was oddly shrewd about how the music could bring in the dollars. For his first country show, he lined up a promotion with a grocery store chain to sell discount tickets with a newspaper coupon. As Pearl remembered, the audience was large enough to fill the house for several performances.
“It was the first time we had any connection with anything like that,” she said. “The store paid for the advertising, and many more tickets were sold, because every [grocery] cashier in a three-county area was working what amounted to a box office. The man was thinking even then.”
The success of the Roy Acuff concert spurred Parker to expand his involvement in the country music milieu, and now he approached Acuff about becoming his manager. But Acuff, whose sister, Sue, lived in Tampa and knew his reputation (“You don’t want the dogcatcher!”), found Parker’s techniques far too radical for the Opry’s staid image.
Acuff, the biggest star on the Opry other than Bill Monroe, saw that Parker was right when he told him he needed to gauge his fee to a percentage of whatever the promoter took in, plus a guarantee. But no one else in country music was doing it, and it just didn’t seem the Christian way. Besides, Parker wanted complete control of Acuff’s career, which the stony-faced bandleader found intolerable.
Yet for a brief period, the two men discussed Acuff’s invitation for Parker to move to Nashville. But when Parker told the star he wanted him to leave the Opry, which paid only scale, for more lucrative personal appearances, the management deal died on the vine. Still, Parker hung tight as an Alabama tick, and to try to ease him out gently, Acuff let him book the dates he still had open, and arranged for him to market his new Roy Acuff Flour throughout Florida.
Before they parted, Acuff gave the budding entrepreneur one piece of gold-plated advice: Eddy Arnold. Now, that was a young man to keep an eye on. The smooth-voiced singer was the featured vocalist for Pee Wee King’s Golden West Cowboys, and he “could charm the warts off a hog’s back.” It was only a matter of time before a talent like that went solo. Any record company would fall over itself to snag him.
In 1942, Parker and his partners branched out their country concert promotions, not so much to benefit the Humane Society, but to benefit themselves. More and more, Parker began distancing himself from his duties at the shelter to learn more about the Nashville way of doing business. As Acuff had advised him, he kept the name Eddy Arnold fresh in his mind.
Away from his job, Parker now began to wear a string tie to accentuate his new persona as a Southern eccentric. He also worked to make his speech more folksy and smoothed some of the rough edges off his accent, although he would always retain a hint of a lisp. When he got nervous, which was rare, he lapsed into a strange linguistic valley between Dutch and English, and involuntarily substituted the word me for I, as in, “Me got to go now.” Whether he intended it, the slip only served to make him seem more of an insular, small-town character.
Soon Parker was booking shows in tandem with two of country -music’s best promoters, the congenial J. L. Frank and Oscar Davis. Parker shared an immediate affinity with the latter. The gravel-voiced Rhode Islander had come to concert promotions from a career in the carnival, where he toured a girl “frozen alive” in ice, going on to present her at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Like Parker, Davis never really left the carnival, and his signature slogan—“Don’t You Dare Miss It!”—was straight out of carny parlance.
Parker saw that Joe Frank was a valuable ally for a variety of reasons, but he also had a hidden motive for wanting to cultivate him: Frank was Pee Wee King’s father-in-law and managed King’s Golden West Cowboys band. That put Parker one step closer to the young Eddy Arnold.
By 1942, Parker must have marveled at the twists of fate that had delivered such events in his life. In the last two years, the thirty-three-year-old had moved from near destitution to a position of relative prosperity. Now his sideline of concert promotions not only offered a new challenge and an avenue back into show business, with its all-important contacts, but also dramatically altered the course of Parker’s life. The concerts proved more lucrative than he imagined, even as the profits were split among his partners. He saw how independent promoters and managers such as Joe Frank and Oscar Davis had been sharp to recognize the nearly limitless potential of the burgeoning country music business, and he intended to claim a large piece of it for himself.
However, Parker’s rash of good fortune also triggered a potential problem in the form of an Internal Revenue Service audit. For an illegal alien who had refused to comply with the Smith Act, the demand to appear before an agent of the federal government must have been terrifying.
And so Parker approached the IRS situation as he would every other tight spot of his life—with a snow job. He began by putting a false bottom, about four inches deep, in the kind of small trunk that show people carried, and then gathered every bill that he could find. Outside the - auditor’s office, he carefully arranged a wad of papers so that several poked out of the lips of the trunk and, once inside, dumped the lot on the agent’s desk with a ceremonious whoosh! Then, like a magician, he continued to make them appear—from his pockets, his hat, his pants legs—in a dazzling display.
To Parker’s extraordinary luck, the auditor happened to have a thundering headache—the staid IRS agent had uncharacteristically tied one on the night before.
“Tom said the guy started pacing back and forth, just holding his head,” remembers Gabe Tucker. “And Tom told him, ‘Hell, let’s count ’em up and see if I owe you something. If I do, me’ll pay it. But I can’t be up here all week.’ It didn’t take him long to get out of there, and after all that, he didn’t owe a damn thing.”
But trouble with the IRS would remain one of Parker’s biggest fears, and in the future, he would do almost anything to avoid the tax man’s scrutiny and suspicion.
He had gotten an even bigger scare in January 1942, when he received the draft board’s questionnaire to determine his classification for military service. As before, the record shows that he made no mention of his previous army experience, but with Bobby then still at home, he argued that he should be classified 3-A, or “deferred for dependency reasons.” The board accepted his claim.
In March 1944, the draft board came calling again, reclassifying Parker as 1-A, or “available for military service.” With that, Parker, whose weight already exceeded that of most healthy males of his height and age group, began piling on food in an effort to have himself reclassified 4-F. Soon, with a stack of three chins bobbing on a thick stalk of a neck and his great protuberance of a belly expanding from his imposing waist, he swelled to such proportions as to resemble his personal totem, the elephant. But it did the trick.
To those around him, Parker undoubtedly appeared to go through the war years without showing the slightest hint of concern about the European front or the effects of a bombing campaign on neutral Holland. But at the same time that his sister Johanna, hoping to learn some word of him, was passing his photograph among American soldiers liberating the Netherlands, Andreas van Kuijk, dressed in his dogcatcher’s uniform, sat at his desk in the Hillsborough County Humane Society, writing secret missives to a soldier wearing the uniform of the Dutch army in the city of Tilburg, some fifteen miles east of Breda. The soldier, who was serving in the Prinses Irene Brigade, a Dutch unit attached to the U.S. Army, was sorry to report before the war’s end that the woman about whom his correspondent inquired, Maria Ponsie van Kuijk, had died. To the recipient, half a world away, the news was stunning. It would take a gathering around God’s table before Andre would see his mother again.
“When I heard that Mother was dead,” he told his brother Ad in 1961, “for me, Holland was also dead. She was my only real tie to Holland.” But it wasn’t until that late date of 1961 that Andre learned that the sad news from the Dutch soldier had been a tragic misunderstanding. Maria van Kuijk had, indeed, lived through the war, but she had also hurled herself into her grief—surely her son himself had not survived, or he would have sent some sort of sign. Now she lay under the good earth with an inconsolable heart, never knowing that her Andre was still alive in America, evolving into the Someone he promised he would be.
In August 1942, Parker became fixated on the name of a man he thought might help him attain that dream. A Warner Bros. film crew came to Tampa to shoot a war movie called Air Force, and the production staff asked if the Humane Society could bring a couple of appealing dogs to Drew Field. Parker was only too happy to be around big-name show people again and held a laughing canine to pose with actor Gig Young for a Tampa Tribune photographer.
“Who is the head man here?” Parker had demanded on arriving. “The director is Howard Hawks,” he was told. “Yes, but who is the very top man?” “That would be Hal Wallis.” The producer was in California, and unable to go to Florida. But Wallis would be the name Parker remembered.
Other film crews would come to Tampa, drawn by the city’s balmy weather and the long hours of daylight. The following winter, MGM brought Spencer Tracy and Irene Dunne to town to make A Guy Named Joe. The Humane Society was again called on to provide animal costars, and Parker, desperate to make the acquaintance of anyone in the film community, invited the camera crew on a family outing.
Still, he obsessed about Wallis. In the old days, the pickpockets, grifters, and gamblers who traveled by rail often had their victim marked before they ever boarded the train. And so was it with Parker and Wallis. The producer could be his ticket in Hollywood.
The same summer that Wallis’s crew came to town, Parker was so heady with success that he made a wild decision. The man whose mission seemed to be to bilk anyone and everyone out of as many goods and services as possible, moved his family out of the free apartment over the Humane Society and into a ranch home at 4218 San Pedro in the newly developed Palma Ceia area of South Tampa.
For the time being, Parker tried to restrict his promotions to three key Florida cities—Orlando, Daytona Beach, and Jacksonville, where he would hire a woman named Mae Boren Axton, who did promotion and publicity to offset her occasional songwriting—and listed himself as a “traveling agent” in the Tampa directory. Working out of the San Pedro house, he called his new venture Tom Parker’s Hillbilly Jamboree and had a box of business cards printed for Ottie P. Johnson, “advertising manager” for press and radio.
In early 1943, through an arrangement with J. L. Frank, Parker booked Pee Wee King and His Golden West Cowboys into a Tampa hotel for a Humane Society show and dance. From there, the band played three weeks of theater dates for him throughout Florida, most of them by the bicycle method, an exhausting practice that required them to play two theaters in the same night, running back and forth between the venues while a movie showed. Joe Frank had praised Parker’s style to his son-in-law, and King understood why—Parker was one of the most energetic men he’d ever seen.
“Regardless of how big the advance sale was, he always tried harder to get bigger crowds, and he was always very good to the entertainers,” King said.
Parker, who had a tin ear and cared nothing about music or individual performers other than how many tickets they sold, brought King’s band to Florida for two reasons: first, to flatter Joe Frank by booking his son-in-law and, more important, to get a good look at Eddy Arnold.
He assessed Arnold’s square-jawed profile and liked what he saw. Then he wondered if the tall twenty-four-year-old with the full-throated baritone could be the heir to the kind of fortune and record sales that the faded Gene Austin had known in his heyday and, better still, if Arnold had the screen presence to carry a Hollywood film. But he made no move to offer a management contract once Arnold left King’s band that May: Marie was adamantly opposed to pulling up stakes and moving to Nashville, and Parker feared that Joe Frank would want to keep Eddy in his personal stable.
The next time Parker and Arnold met was the fall of 1943. By now, Eddy had assembled his own band, the Tennessee Plowboys, and the foursome, dressed in country gentlemen attire, picked and sang live each morning for the farmers and early risers over Nashville’s WSM radio. Arnold also occasionally appeared on an early-evening show that was produced out of the WSM studios before the Opry. One such Saturday night, Arnold was tuning up before that show when Parker, who happened to be in Nashville on one of his talent-scouting trips, heard - Arnold’s name on a station promo and rushed over to catch the singer before he went on the air.
“He introduced himself to me,” Arnold remembered, and started with the homespun patter that he’d refined to seductive art—said he’d heard a lot of good things about Eddy since he’d gone out on his own, had just seen the profile of him in Radio Mirror magazine, and hoped they’d work together soon. Then he lit into his management pitch.
Arnold smiled a toothy grin and thanked him but explained that he was already in negotiation with Dean Upson, the WSM Artist Service Bureau chief, about that very thing.
“Well,” Parker added, “I manage Gene Austin, you know.” Arnold’s face lit up, and the Tampa dogcatcher knew he’d rolled a lucky seven. Gene Austin had long been one of Eddy’s inspirations. And so it was with two agendas that Parker took Austin backstage at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium for a Grand Ole Opry performance not long after that meeting with Arnold at WSM. Austin had filed for bankruptcy the previous year, and if Parker could get him on the Opry to do a song or two, maybe book some club dates out of it, he’d be only too happy to help an old friend. If in the process Parker should just happen to give Eddy Arnold the thrill of his life by introducing him to his hero, well, certainly there’d be no harm in that.
Arnold recalls that when they talked in earnest, Parker didn’t mince words. “Tom was obviously interested in finding a new, young artist,” Arnold says. “Seemed like he knew what he was talking about. And I was a hungry boy.”
After that, Parker began to pop up more and more around Nashville, getting in Eddy’s face whenever possible. Sooner or later, he would find a way to woo the Plowboy.
Parker’s frequent trips to Nashville reminded him just how much he missed the traveling and the exhilarating cadence of the wheels rolling beneath him. For that reason—and to study the mind-set of the typical country musician, whose generally honest and unfettered psyche he had yet to fully grasp—Parker signed on as Pee Wee King’s road manager for the bulk of the 1943 season. Then, as King remembers, Parker was always eager to play cards and shoot dice with the band to kill the long hours on the drives between dates, keeping a $100 bill in his wallet for gambling emergencies.
When the tour ended, he returned to Florida and booked personal appearances for newcomer Ernest Tubb. Parker was one of the best promoters there was, in Tubb’s estimation, but he told his son, Justin, that he’d never use him on a long-term basis because “he’d constantly try to put one over on you—that was the life he’d led as a carny.”
Parker saw the extreme advantage to staying on good terms with a rising star like Tubb. Soon Parker surprised Justin, then almost nine, and his younger sister, Elaine, with the magnanimous gift of two ponies: a black-and-white paint named Honey for Justin, and a smaller Shetland and buckboard for his sister.
The Tubb children, not knowing that Parker needed to unload the last vestiges of his kiddie ride concessions, were thrilled at such benevolence, even if Elaine’s pony, Trigger, was, in fact, both old and blind. But their father suspected that Parker seldom did a favor without expecting one in return, and that while he gave the children the ponies because he hoped they would enjoy years of pleasure with them, he also planned to use the gifts as leverage. Indeed, Parker had plans for expanding his relationship with the lanky Opry star.
Since 1941, the WSM Artist Service Bureau had been commissioning a series of summer tent shows that took the Opry from its base in middle Tennessee and out into the rural South. Parker had tossed his hat in the ring as the booker and advance man, or “general agent,” for the Jamup and Honey tent show of 1944, which would go out that April, taking country music to audiences that couldn’t travel due to wartime restrictions on tires and gasoline.
The Jamup and Honey show, he told Harry Stone, WSM’s general manager, held special interest for him. Aside from the blackface comedy duo, who’d heard about Parker’s prowess as a promoter from Roy Acuff, the show starred old-time banjo player Uncle Dave Macon, Minnie Pearl, and Eddy Arnold, the rising performer who, in his first year on the Opry, was already being considered to host his own segment. With Stone’s and - Acuff’s recommendations, Parker got the job.
On the day that the Jamup and Honey tent show opened a five-day run in Mobile, Alabama, the rain came down with such velocity that great tongues of water lapped at the slopes of the taut canvas tent, finally seeping through and dripping down below. By the time for the first of two shows that evening, the ground under the tent brimmed like a river, so much so, as Gabe Tucker, then Eddy Arnold’s bass player, remembers, “We performed barefooted, it was so bad. And God, it rained every day.”
Still, the April showers could not deter the throngs of people who came not just from Mobile, the Azalea City, but from the outlying rural areas, eager to plunk down their hard-won, wartime cash of twenty, thirty, and thirty-five cents a head—even the top ticket price of $1—to hear and see the Grand Ole Opry under canvas. For hours, they stood in a great snake of a line, the men in suits and ties, the women in Sunday dresses and long coats to keep off the spring chill, hoping to be among the lucky 1,500 to crowd into the 80-by-220-foot tent.
For Tom Parker, who had traveled the back roads of the central South and Midwest as part of the booking agent, bill poster, and advance-man crew, the choice of Mobile was not by happenstance. In selecting the spots where he would recast his life once again, following the WSM radio clear-channel signal, he returned to the city where he most likely came ashore in 1929 and reshaped himself into an entirely new entity.
Now, as the tent show got under way for the second week, Parker doubled back to Mobile to see if he had delivered what he’d promised both WSM’s general manager, Harry Stone, and Lee Davis “Honey” Wilds, the owner of the show, whose daily operating expenses reached nearly $600 (“Everybody said we were crazy,” admitted Wilds), and who paid the radio station a weekly commission for using its call letters and the name Grand Ole Opry. Almost always along the route of one-night locales like Caruthersville, Missouri; Harrison, Arkansas; and Meridian, Mississippi—the idea was to pick little towns that didn’t have auditoriums—Parker would discover with great satisfaction that the shows sold out, often with monstrous crowds still waiting at the door. Sometimes nearly the whole town showed up: in one Oklahoma berg of 1,500, 1,100 people turned out to sit shoulder to shoulder, ten to a row, in sections marked by lines of slender poles. Word quickly filtered back to Nashville.
“Even with the tent shows,” says Pee Wee King, “Tom seemed to know how to put them in the right place at the right time. Some of us would go out on the road in Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama and have rain. And Tom would be in Illinois and Indiana and Iowa, maybe also having rain, but still drawing crowds.”
As the poster of the 21-by-28-inch signs (HEARD THEM ON THE AIR! STARS IN PERSON! MAMMOTH TENT THEATRE!) that brought folks flocking to a tent illuminated by dangling lightbulbs and thrown up in the middle of a farmer’s pasture, Parker traversed the country in a well-worn International panel truck, painted a somewhat sickening shade of yellow and festooned with bright red letters boasting WSM, GRAND OLE OPRY, ADVERTISING.
“They furnished him that ol’ truck and gave him Green Stamps for gasoline,” says Gabe Tucker, who first met Parker on the show, having admired his promotional skills since the Gene Austin days in the late ’30s. “He slapped them big posters, the three [30-by-60 pictorial] sheets, up on the sides of barns with flour and water, and oh God, that truck smelled awful, just sour as hell. And he slept in it every once in a while out there on the road. I felt sorry for him, dressed like a tramp in them awkward-lookin’ shoes with his britches halfway down ’em. Marie was in Tampa, and he was so damn lonesome. It was pretty rough living.”
But being attached to the show brought Parker in close proximity to Eddy Arnold. The singer’s management contract with Dean Upson wasn’t due to expire until October 1945, yet Parker wanted to lay the groundwork now. Both Tucker and Little Roy Wiggins, the eighteen-year-old who played steel guitar in Eddy’s band, remember seeing him standing in the shadows, watching, only the red glow of his cigar giving him away.
The tent show was a perfect vantage point from which Parker could talk to Arnold, persuade him, and learn more about him. To achieve that, he needed to be around the singer often enough that Arnold would feel comfortable with him and seek his advice. Even though Parker felt superior to most of the troupe, particularly with his shrewdness about money, he also wanted to make a favorable impression on the people around him, both by his actions and results as an advance man, and by the sheer force of his personality. Since he was not just establishing himself, but still recreating himself as a country promoter, he hoped to bolster his own reputation and to further his education in the hillbilly ways. He knew the way to win their confidence was to gain popularity.
And so at least once a month, or every ten days if he could manage it, Parker made a point of circling back to the show on the pretense of working out a problem or to pick up his pay.
“He was trying to make friends with everybody that was there, because he didn’t know who was heavy [with power] and who wasn’t,” says Gabe Tucker. Since Parker envied Tucker’s proximity to the star, “we got along just fine. But back then, he could get along with anybody. He was the nicest guy in the world when he needed you.”
Before long, Parker was traveling in the car with the eccentric, whiskey-nipping Uncle Dave Macon—who in 1926 became a cornerstone of the Opry as the first individual featured performer—and his handsome son Dorris, who accompanied his father on guitar.
A plus for Parker when he accompanied the troupe was that although they traveled at night, while it was cool, and arrived in the wee hours of the morning, he got to sample the downy comfort of a real bed, rather than sleep in the truck, even if the accommodations were, as Honey Wilds remembered, “little wasp-nest hotels.”
Although Jamup and Honey wrote and performed comedic songs, their primary act was a lively amalgamation of Southern humor, drawn from the nineteenth-century minstrel tradition and mugged in blackface as tribute to the Negro culture.
With his sulfurous sense of humor and appetite for the practical joke, Parker was more naturally drawn to comedy than he was to the homemade music of the rural Southeast, with its reliance on story songs chock full of drunks, disappointed love, and deferred dreams. And perhaps because a joke about a bumpkin farmer from small-town Tennessee was not so different from a joke about a farmer from a small village in Holland, Parker reveled in the stories about rube hillbillies, ethnic immigrants, and the hayseed who got the best of the city slicker that made up the country comic’s stock-in-trade.
Whether he realized it, Parker’s six-month excursion in the company of country comedians had a profound effect on his thinking and entrepreneurial style. In years to come, he would often book a comic on his shows, whether the headliner was Hank Snow or Elvis Presley, and even when such opening acts were no longer fashionable or appropriate.
Out on the road, Parker spent long hours with the troupe, sharing meals, leisurely telling stories, strolling around the town with them before packing up the cars and heading out to the tent grounds for the performance. Yet when Minnie Pearl, who had known him from his earlier days in Tampa, tried to engage him in intimate conversation about his youth and growing-up years, the usually gregarious promoter turned silent. As she said years later, “I was with him for months at a stretch, and he never even slipped and mentioned anything about his background.”
Pearl was mystified, since “Southern people talk about their grandmother, their great-grandmother, what their daddy did, what their grandfather did. They’re involved in background and family.” The rumor, which she believed, was that “the enigma,” as she called him, was born down around Lawrenceburg, Tennessee. But no matter how hard she tried to confirm it, Parker refused to divulge a single detail.
However, he seemed to enjoy a more relaxed rapport with Honey Wilds. While Parker naturally would have tried to cultivate the show’s owner—the man who hired him “right out of that dog pound,” as Honey remembered—the towering Wilds was not the easiest man to know. Like many comedians, the off-stage Wilds was frequently difficult and unpleasant, with a streak that ran close to morose. He also gave off an air of danger. Wilds routinely carried a pocket knife, which he always prided as the sharpest in the room and, on the lot, a ten-inch crescent wrench, which he brandished like a weapon. For the countless miles of travel, he armed himself with a pistol, sometimes shooting it within ten feet of someone just to get their attention.
The basis of his bond with Parker, concludes David Wilds, Honey’s son, “was that what each did appealed to the other. My father was a total creative rebel. He was a lot like Tom in that he was a very intelligent guy who worked really hard to either dominate a situation through any means necessary, or pretend that he wasn’t as shrewd as he was. Tom’s thought process was just constantly evolving, and Daddy had a tremendous appreciation for his ability to get things done.”
As the nights turned nippy and the tent show ended its season that fall of ’44, Parker threw a big dinner for the troupe in Tampa. In retrospect, say members of Arnold’s band, such uncharacteristic generosity came more from Parker’s hope to impress Eddy than anything else, since Eddy still hadn’t made up his mind about this uneducated hustler with the faulty English.
Parker was already full of plans on how to make Eddy a major name, even outside the confines of the Opry. But until he was able to snag the singer’s management contract, Parker hired on with J. L. Frank as a stump man, a combination of promoter, road manager, and advance agent, keeping Frank’s acts working in the South and Midwest.
At a time when most country acts booked dates and tours from their home telephone, and the switchboard operator at the Grand Ole Opry acted as an answering service for the few personal managers working out of Nashville, Parker ran his business out of the lobby of Nashville’s Andrew Jackson Hotel, making use of its free wall phones and letter desks.
“He used to tell people in New York, ‘Call me in my office at two o’clock,’ ” remembered Parker’s carnival friend Jack Kaplan. “He’d sit there and wait on it, just so everybody would think he had a big office in Nashville.”
Primarily, Parker handled a tour of several hundred dates for Ernest Tubb. With a huge hit like “Soldier’s Last Letter” and a pair of quickie movies, Tubb was now a big enough star to headline a package of Opry newcomers, including comic Rod Brasfield and, as an extra added attraction, the Poe Sisters, real-life siblings just barely into their twenties who used the stage names Ruth and Nelle.
As usual, Parker traveled two weeks ahead of the dates, booking auditoriums and theaters, billing posters, arranging for newspaper ads and hotel accommodations, and in keeping with Joe Frank’s brand of broadcast promotion, setting up fifteen-minute early-morning radio programs for the troupe to come in to advertise the show.
Somewhere along the route, Tubb would get a telegram from Joe Frank telling him where Parker would catch up with him, usually in one of Tom’s favorite diners. There, Parker would fill him in on what he’d lined up, writing it all down in his meticulous, methodical handwriting and passing the schedule sheet across a table ladened with double orders of chicken-fried steak served on green, sectioned plates, with plenty of sweet tea to wash it down. Afterward, Tubb would silently lay a deck of cards or a pair of dice on the table, and he and Parker would adjourn to get up a friendly game. “He’d take a chance on anything,” says Gabe Tucker.
In contrast to his shabby, vagabond appearance with the Jamup and Honey tent show, Parker, as an agent for the distinguished Joe Frank, dressed in the kinds of clothes that had once delighted the young Andreas van Kuijk.
“He would always wear a white shirt with a nice sport jacket and slacks,” recalls Nelle Poe. “He was already heavyset and balding, but he really looked like a gentleman. He traveled so hard and fast promoting us that he would have a whole suitcase of white shirts, but he wouldn’t have time to get them laundered. He’d say, ‘I’m sending them home for my wife to do them. I’ll pick them up on the next trip.’ ”
Parker was in unusually good spirits on the tour, and soon he grew so bold as to insinuate himself into Tubb’s stage act, impersonating the comedian Smiley Burnette and his character Frog Millhouse, Gene Autry’s faithful sidekick. With his penchant for costumes, Parker had acquired an outfit similar to Burnette’s signature look of checked shirt, loose black kerchief draped at the neck, and a floppy black hat turned sideways.
Nelle Poe remembers that Parker, who had studied Burnette’s moves and could mug his poses, was able to play the comic with unnerving accuracy. “As soon as Ernest walked out on the stage,” says Poe, “Tom would start down the aisle, brushing people’s shoulders off with a little broom. He would do that on both sides of the audience, and Ernest would just stop and stand there with his guitar and look through the crowd like he didn’t know what was going on. Of course, Ernest couldn’t sing, because people were just howling at this big commotion of Tom’s. He was really hilarious.”
The heady reception fueled Parker’s honeyed dreams of fame. “He always said to me, ‘I’m going to Hollywood someday,’ ” Poe adds. “He had big ambitions, and he was sure he was destined for great things.”
Yet Parker surely knew that his best chances of succeeding in Hollywood were not as a performer, but through his management of an alter ego. To that end, he continued to keep a vigilant watch on Eddy Arnold, who had just been tapped to host Ralston Purina’s “Checkerboard Square” segment of the Grand Ole Opry, a plum spot.
As Eddy began to rouse the attention of national advertisers, Parker repositioned himself to strengthen his relationship with the budding star. Working with freelance promoter Jim Bulleit, who had headed the Opry Artist Service Bureau before the war, he booked Eddy for two weeks of theater dates in Florida during the winter of 1944–45. The idea was to show Arnold that he could bring him up a level, to get him away from the little piss-ant county fairs Eddy had played with Pee Wee King, where the people came up to grab a piece of the star or get an autograph. Once he was able to manage a top-notch act like Arnold, Parker vowed, he’d take him only to the bigger rodeos and fairs, and restrict that kind of fan access. To get the crowds lathered up, and then declare his star untouchable, was to rend him a god.
In the fall of 1945, Parker made a handshake deal with Arnold for exclusive representation. It was not the clear, round tones of Eddy’s baritone that called to him, nor the Western bent of the tenor end of Eddy’s register, reaching to surreal high yodel. With the understanding that Parker would take 25 percent of Arnold’s income and Eddy would pay the expenses, Parker was not even overly concerned with the money he hoped to realize in bringing Eddy to prominence, although his funds were so tight that Marie had to temporarily hock her wedding ring to finance his trip to Tennessee. For him, the chance to couple his fate to Eddy’s was a matter of personal power, of showing folks how to play the game.
As before, in the name of promotion, he was shameless. Joey Hoffman, Peasy’s son, remembers seeing him hand out pictures in front of the grandstand at the Tampa fairgrounds to advertise Eddy’s show, telling passersby, “It’s free today, but the next time you see this face, you’ll be paying for it!”
Yet Parker saved his boldest move for the day of the show, when he ambled down to the opening of Jack Shepherd’s grocery store on Howard Avenue and approached a hillbilly band playing live on the air. Brashly, he went up to the microphone and asked the lead singer if he knew Eddy - Arnold’s favorite song, “Mommy, Please Stay Home with Me.” The singer sheepishly said he didn’t, so Parker invited the band—and the listening audience—to come out to the fair to hear Eddy sing it himself, thus wangling a free radio advertisement out of the station.
“He was a ball of fire, he worked hard, he got up early, and he was a nondrinker,” Arnold says, reflecting on Parker’s tireless efforts on his behalf. “He had a lot of energy. Actually, he was good at everything. He understood business, he was good with the record company, and he was good with the personal appearances. He was absolutely dedicated to the personality that he represented.”
Although other managers stayed in their office and used the phone to complete their advance work, Parker crisscrossed the country setting up tours, often staying away for two months at a time, and bringing along for company either Bitsy Mott, Marie’s diminutive brother, or Bevo Bevis, the twenty-six-year-old boy-man. Behind them, Parker towed a humpbacked trailer emblazoned with cartoonish renderings of Eddy’s face, and filled it with posters, fly sheets, signs, pictures, and banners—anything to spread the word that “Eddy Arnold, the Tennessee Plowboy and His Guitar,” as the trailer boasted in foot-high letters, was coming to town.
“When he was settin’ up a tour,” says Gabe Tucker, “he’d try to get enough money from whoever was promoting it, and, hell, he would go back to the same places sometimes two or three times if it was necessary, makin’ sure folks knowed Eddy was a-comin.’ And he’d tell the promoter, ‘Put it on the radio. My boy can’t draw you no people if they don’t know he’s gonna be here,’ see. He would work on it and stay on it. That’s one reason Eddy got in the bracket that he did, ’cause Tommy worked his ass off. If he was awake,” adds Tucker, “he was preachin’ Eddy Arnold to anybody that’d listen.”
And like a member of any secret society, Parker knew just where to go when he needed help, back to the place and the people who still churned in his blood. To promote Eddy’s early records, especially, Parker went home to the carnival, where the bearded ladies and the sprightly midgets and the fixers in their pin stripe suits and diamond rings took him in, blaring Arnold’s songs over their loudspeakers as a favor to one of their own.
Yet “Tommy’s boy,” as the carnies affectionately called the singer, was embarrassed by such display and, on tour, quickly tired of the out-of-the-way drives to thank a hard-bitten carny manager for playing and selling his records.
“We got somebody up at this turnoff we need to go see,” Parker would begin, driving out in the middle of the pitch-black nowhere, on a night pierced only by the light of the stars. Eddy, knowing what was coming, and chagrined about having to meet some leopard-skinned strongman with a neck like a pillar, finally began to voice his discontent. “Tom, do I have to? Do I have to . . . ? ”
Eddy was not the only one who chafed at some of the new manager’s methods of doing business. Almost immediately, Parker began to expand Arnold’s tours beyond the bankable South and Southwest, taking the band and the opening act, the straw-hatted comedy duo of Lonzo and Oscar, as far north as Pennsylvania. He also stepped up the schedule, booking more dates than they’d ever played before, which meant they performed five nights during the week, drove all night Friday to get home by Saturday to play the Grand Ole Opry, and then left again on Sunday.
“It was really too much,” remembers steel guitarist Little Roy Wiggins, who had played behind Paul Howard at fourteen and Pee Wee King at fifteen before joining the Tennessee Plowboys. “I told Parker he was queer for that white line in the middle of the highway, because he just had to run up and down that road like crazy.”
Once, after Eddy got rolling a little bit, Parker booked him into the city auditorium in Chattanooga, where the promoter had a reputation for not paying the artist. Parker had already gotten half of his money in advance and intended to collect the remaining half in cash before the show started.
“Tom came back backstage while the musicians were standing there, strumming their guitars, waiting,” Eddy recalls. “And he said to me, - ‘Don’t you hit a lick until I go [waves his hand].’ That would mean he had gotten the money. Well, he went to this gentleman [the promoter], and he said, ‘You know, those singers, they’re funny. They won’t sing a note unless I wave my hand.’ A couple of minutes later, I peeped through the curtain and he waved at me, and we did the show.”
Despite Arnold’s cachet as an RCA Victor recording artist and a member of the Grand Ole Opry, in the early days the idea of playing any city auditorium would have been a mere pipe dream for Arnold, whose tenure with Parker got off to a modest start. Bitsy Mott remembers the dates included towns in Texas that were so small and remote that the show was literally staged in a barn.
“We used to play all those places,” he says, “and sometimes you had to kick the debris out of your way before you could let people come in—cows had been in there, you know. We set up wooden benches, and it was ‘A dollar a ticket, sit where you like.’ I used to hear him say that all the time.”
The early tours were heady experiences for the young troupers, who were constantly learning something new about the business, and about each other. Parker vowed to always carry a fresh cigar, so that when the negotiations started and the questions came, he could light the stogie, puff some fire through it until he coaxed an orange hue at its end, and set it up for business in the corner of his mouth. By then, he’d had time to consider his answer.
Parker’s habit of seeing how much he could get for as little as he could give reached new heights of audacity as Eddy’s career heated up. The manager found it increasingly necessary to remain in Nashville when the group came in off the road. As he had done from the beginning, Parker took it for granted that he was welcome to stay with Eddy and his wife, Sally, a Kentucky girl whom Arnold married in late 1941 while performing with Pee Wee King.
One guest in the house had been enough for the Arnolds, who tried to keep their business and home life separate. But now Parker brought the hapless Bevo, whom Parker called Arnold’s “tour manager” in the press, and Marie, who exuded a certain chilliness to both Sally and Roy - Wiggins’s wife, Joyce. And before long, Bobby Ross, who hoped to become a manager or promoter after apprenticing with Parker (he would eventually handle Slim Whitman and assist the Colonel in winning - Whitman’s first record contract), came up from Tampa and moved in right along with them. The foursome stayed anywhere from three or four days to nearly a month.
This parasitic arrangement fit the pattern of Parker’s freeloading days of old, and seemed not to bother the thrifty Dutchman in the slightest, no matter who it inconvenienced. Eddy and Sally had recently bought a five-room redbrick bungalow in Madison, about seven miles west of downtown Nashville. But since Eddy’s mother, Georgia, often lived there, too, and the couple welcomed the birth of daughter Jo Ann in December 1945, the house was full.
Fifty years later, Sally Arnold still rolled her eyes when the subject came up, too much of a Southern lady to say more. At the time, Eddy managed to keep his composure, until Parker also took over Arnold’s newly rented office in the upstairs of a Madison real estate firm.
“Tommy told him, ‘Plowboy, you need a place where you can store all of your songbooks,’ ” Gabe Tucker remembers. “And hell, he just dropped the shuck on him then. Eddy paid for the whole thing, and Tommy had a bigger office than Eddy did and never paid a nickel on it. Eddy started to say something to him about it, and Tommy said, ‘Well, me taking care of you. Give me a better place to do it.’ He never paid for office space, nowhere, his whole life.”
It was at this point, after the Parkers had imposed on the Arnolds’ hospitality for a particularly long and grating stay, that Eddy prompted one of Parker’s most famous lines. As the singer wrote in his autobiography, “I said to him once when he was managing me, ‘Tom, why don’t you get yourself a hobby—play golf, go boating, or something?’ He looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘You’re my hobby.’ ”
The Arnolds found relief only after Parker bought a small but stately fieldstone home nearby on Madison’s Gallatin Road.
By the time Parker assumed Arnold’s management, the Tennessee Plowboy, who would become one of the most prolific hit-making artists of all time, had made his first indelible mark with “Each Minute Seems a Million Years.” The song rose to the number five spot in Billboard’s tabulation of best-selling “folk” music.
To move beyond any initial blush of success, however, Eddy needed an energetic team working in tandem. While Steve Sholes, the heavy-set and avuncular head of RCA Records’ country and R&B divisions, was already in place, Tom Parker would head that team and rely on it for his own advancement in the industry. Eventually he would bring all the players to the group that would later figure so heavily in taking Elvis to the top, most prominently Hill and Range music publishers Jean and Julian Aberbach, and Harry Kalcheim and Abe Lastfogel of the powerful William Morris Agency. Nearly every major career move he guided for Arnold—a string of chart-topping records, the judicious use of early television, a foray into Hollywood movies, and even engagements in Las Vegas—served as the blueprint for Parker’s plan with Elvis.
From the instant he took over Arnold’s career, Parker began building momentum, not just for Arnold, but for himself. In what would serve as his lifelong pattern of artist and record company relations, he kept his client as isolated from the record label as possible. By appearing to make himself indispensable to both parties, he hoped to increase his importance and clout, while manipulating his client’s knowledge of the intricacies of the deals.
Above all, it was imperative that the record label executives—and others in the trade—see Parker as a figure of equal or greater stature to his artist. In magazine and newspaper advertisements he coupled his name with that of Eddy’s—UNDER EXCLUSIVE MANAGEMENT OF THOMAS A. PARKER—in letters nearly the same size as those employed for Arnold’s. The idea was to convey not only Parker’s insistence that they were a team, but that Parker was a deal maker worthy of celebration and reward. Already he was having large studio portraits taken of himself, in which he smiled broadly from within the proud confines of an expensive pinstripe suit. He signed them “the Gov.”
Three years later, in October 1948, Parker seized the opportunity to obtain a more prestigious title on a trip to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. With Gabe Tucker in tow, he called on an old carny acquaintance, Bob Greer, then an aide to Governor Jimmie Davis, who’d had an earlier taste of fame as a country singer with “You Are My Sunshine.” Parker and Greer carried on about their old shenanigans—“cutting up jackpots” in the carny vernacular—and Tucker, amused by Parker’s outrageous stories of the showman’s swindle, declared that anyone who could snow with such velocity should have a title, and put the request to Greer. Thrilled at the prospects of such an inspired con, Parker refused to leave town until the document, which commissioned him as a Louisiana colonel, with all the rights, privileges, and responsibilities thereunto appertaining, was in his hands.
Until now, Parker had requested that the members of Arnold’s band refer to him as Popsy, a feigned intimacy designed to wheedle favors out of them. (“You like your room? Buy Popsy a cigar.”) But things had changed.
“He turned around,” as Tucker remembers, “and said, ‘In the future, Mr. Tucker, you will make sure that everybody addresses me as Colonel.’ ” And so the former army deserter now carried what many construed as a military title.
In his early years with Arnold, Parker was dictatorial in the extreme, laying down the law with theater managers over concession rights, and stripping Arnold’s band members of the songbook sales they shared in arrangement with Eddy. Now the old carny kept the songbook money for himself and his family, sending Bitsy and Bevo out in the aisles with their arms loaded up with books, pictures, and programs, and installing Marie at a table in the lobby.
“The specter of Tom selling pictures and records down the aisles of a venue was one to behold,” says Bob McCluskey, former general promotion manager for RCA Victor. “That, to my knowledge, no pop manager had ever done.”
But it also sent a seething shiver through Little Roy Wiggins. Parker delighted in stirring up trouble among the band members, who, before his arrival, had enjoyed an easy camaraderie. Since they never seemed to have an argument when he wasn’t around, eventually they recognized it as a control mechanism, Tucker seeing how Parker loved it when “all of us would run to him so he could be the great fixer,” and how the tales of internal bickering gave him a window onto everything that went on with his star.
When Eddy told Parker that Wiggins was irate at the loss of $100 a week in songbook commissions and intimated he might quit, Parker sent the message that he didn’t care what Little Roy did. “Coinnal,” as Wiggins mocked the way Parker pronounced his new title and his inability to say r’s, had decided that’s the way it was going to be.
With pressure building, an altercation was inevitable, and it came one night in El Paso, Texas, when Eddy played a private party there. Afterward, Wiggins, drinking a beer, headed for the bus to take him to the hotel.
“Where do you think you’re going with that beer in your hand?” demanded one of Parker’s staffers. “You’re not getting on this bus with that beer.”
“Just who in the hell says I’m not?” countered the five-foot Wiggins, empowered by the brew.
“The Colonel says you’re not.”
“Well, fuck the Coinnal!” Roy cursed in anger, and then went to Eddy and explained what happened. “I’ll kill that big, fat, sloppy mother,” he spewed. Eddy calmed him, said Parker was wrong, and he would speak to him about it tomorrow. But back at the hotel, goaded on by Vic Willis of the Willis Brothers, a featured act on Arnold’s shows, Wiggins could stand it no longer, remembering every slight he’d endured since Parker came on board—how he’d advised Arnold to take the band off a percentage basis and put them on salary, and how he’d cut them out of Arnold’s record royalties, something Eddy promised when he formed the band in 1943. Finally, Wiggins picked up the phone and called the Colonel himself. “It’s one of the things I am proudest of in my life,” says Wiggins. “I cussed him for thirty minutes—at least thirty minutes—until, well, he got to cryin’, really.”
A tearful Parker tried to explain about the beer. “Don’t you know about insurance?” he said.
“Don’t run that ‘snowplow’ at me,” Wiggins retorted. “I ain’t drivin’ that damn bus.”
For three days, the men saw not one glimpse of each other. Then Wiggins was on the hotel elevator when it stopped on Parker’s floor. “Woy,” said Parker, standing in the door and waiting to get on, “I want to talk to you. Everything’s all right between me and you, except one thing. Did you say, ‘Fuck the Coinnal?’ ”
“I had embarrassed him in front of his flunkies,” remembers Wiggins. “I think that really got through to him.”
In time, the enigmatic Parker held himself above almost everyone—certainly the powers at RCA—in a nearly Machiavellian thirst to seize and hold power. That obsession, unencumbered by the usual ethical, moral, or social values (even his brother-in-law, Bitsy Mott, felt compelled to call him “sir”), would grow in direct proportion to Parker’s success, first with Arnold, whom he elevated to the number-one-selling country artist, and later with Elvis. Parker saw it only as maximizing the opportunity, both for his client and for himself.
Perhaps Parker’s earliest test came in his negotiations with Jean and Julian Aberbach, the Viennese Jews who would become an essential spoke in the wheel that drove Eddy’s career.
In 1944, only five years after Jean immigrated to the United States to work for Chappel Music, the Aberbach brothers founded Hill and Range Songs, Inc., a Los Angeles and New York–based company that specialized in C&W tunes.
By the end of 1945, when most New York publishers saw no percentage in country-and-western music, the visionary Aberbachs had three songs at the top of the charts and $50,000 in the bank. Not surprising, then, the Aberbachs took keen notice of newcomer Arnold and particularly of the success that publishers Fred Forster and Wally Fowler enjoyed when the young singer recorded their songs. To sew up a rising star like Arnold—to have him predisposed to select songs from their catalog—would be a fine thing. And so before Eddy’s recording session in early 1946, Jean and Julian, at Sholes’s invitation, met with Arnold, Parker, and the RCA producer to present songs and perhaps work out an agreement.
In the immediate years to follow, the Aberbachs—shrewd, sophisticated, fastidiously dressed, and displaying such cultured accents and gracious European manners that some pronounced them “oily”—offered an array of incentives to induce label executives, artists, and managers to do business.
Thus, before Arnold’s first session of 1946—his third session with Sholes and his fourth overall—the Aberbachs presented Eddy with a check for $20,000, a substantial amount of money for the time, but perhaps not so large considering what they hoped to get in return.
“It was really for nothing, you see,” explains the erudite Julian Aberbach. “We promised Eddy that every good song that we had we would submit to him first before we went to any other artist. Then we tried to get the best songs that we had that would fit Eddy Arnold.”
Beginning with the March 1946 recording session, where Arnold recorded two Hill and Range songs, the uptempo “Can’t Win, Can’t Place, Can’t Show” and “Chained to a Memory,” which climbed to number three on the Billboard chart, most Eddy Arnold sessions included at least one tune published by Hill and Range. For a time, says Bob McCluskey, “almost every release of any importance was a Hill and Range song.”
To McCluskey, it was almost certain that Sholes, a family man, was secretly on the take, and that Parker, who exploited the greed of others, knew it. “If Eddy got the twenty grand, what do you think Sholes got? [They] obviously owed [their] soul to Hill and Range after taking the money. Once it’s in your pocket, there is no turning back, because they have you and they can talk.”
According to Aberbach, Parker, as Arnold’s manager, received 25 percent of Eddy’s $20,000, “which was more than justified, because he had [only] one artist. He always had a deal, and he was without any doubt an excellent deal maker and skilled negotiator. But he was honest.”
Honesty, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. As the Aberbachs’ cousin, music publisher Freddy Bienstock points out Parker always had side deals, too, and especially with RCA Victor, where in a very real sense, he was the client, not Eddy Arnold and, later, not even Elvis Presley. From the beginning of his association with the label, it was obvious to Parker that there was plenty of money to go around, especially for the man who had the gumption to speak up and demand it, a man whose key to survival, as Gabe Tucker asserts, was always to have something better than a contract—maybe a little something to remind a guy about when the circumstance demanded.
Arnold, while grateful for the astonishing level of success he found under Parker—by 1952, he was no longer the hayseed Grand Ole Opry performer, but the star of his own network television show—chafed at certain aspects of the Colonel’s flamboyant style.
Indeed, Parker seemed to want to control every facet of Arnold’s life. (“All Eddy takes care of is his toothbrush and his drawers,” the Colonel crowed.) The two men clashed about the direction of Eddy’s music—the singer, who now hated the “Plowboy” moniker, hoped to embrace a more sophisticated sound—and Arnold was continually embarrassed by Parker’s shabby dress, his braggadocio (“Which one of our planes did you come down in today?” he’d ask Eddy in a crowded elevator), and his use of carny promotions, such as parading an elephant through Nashville’s downtown streets to advertise Arnold’s appearances.
Yet far more troubling to Arnold was Parker’s alleged involvement with the careers of other performers. The familiar rumor that the Colonel sold Hadacol—the patent medicine made up mostly of ethyl alcohol—or secretly booked the entertainers for the Hadacol Caravan appears not to be based in fact. But Parker was working with Hank Snow and Tommy Sands through his new company, Jamboree Attractions, which rankled Arnold down deep. Together, they’d sold nearly 30 million records, and the way Arnold saw it, the 25 percent he paid Parker was for exclusivity. Then in the summer of 1953 came an embarrassing blowup in Las Vegas.
According to Roy Wiggins, Eddy, then playing the Sahara Hotel, was alone in his room when the phone rang, and the caller, thinking he had Tom Diskin, Parker’s new lieuenant, on the line, said, “Tell the Colonel that show we got together with Hank Snow is doing okay.” Arnold, angry and shaken, went down to the coffee shop to confront the Colonel and saw him hide something under the table—Parker would later claim it was an ad he had taken out to surprise his client—as he approached. An argument ensued outside, “and by the time I walked up,” remembers Wiggins, “they were at it pretty good.” Eddy drew back his fist—“Don’t hit him!” yelled a frightened Marie Parker—and the singer later sent a telegram that informed his manager he was no longer in need of his services.
The firing left Parker humiliated and deeply wounded, and the stress of it all so unraveled him that shortly after, the Colonel suffered the first of many heart attacks. Although his weight, which had hovered dangerously around three hundred pounds, dropped dramatically during his recovery, he told almost no one about his illness, afraid that the clients like Snow, and Rod Brasfield, and Mother Maybelle and the Carter Sisters—who were beginning to come to him and Diskin, for bookings, if not always for “direction,” as he called it—would desert him.
Worse, he feared he would lose his power at RCA, as Sholes, shifting his allegiance to Arnold, “treated him like a flea-bitten alley dog, and him and Sholes was never the greatest of friends after that,” Gabe Tucker recalls. Immediately, he put the squeeze on Sholes and Singles Division Manager Bill Bullock—who was being whispered about as “the Colonel’s guy”—to let him manage the upcoming RCA Victor Country Caravan, a package tour designed to showcase the label’s country stars, with Hank Snow headlining.
Set for spring of ’54, the Caravan was the brainchild of Bob McCluskey, who’d gotten $50,000 allocated for it, and was now being pressured to involve Parker. McCluskey said that the Colonel could help with some of the dates, but he didn’t want him in control of the money, “as he’d already gotten a reputation that was quite unsavory, and I was responsible for all that dough.” The next thing McCluskey knew, he was out of a job, and Parker was in charge of the venture. “He got the money up front,” says McCluskey, “and I was told that the money he didn’t spend was his, as no one would ask for it to be returned.”
Next Parker moved to bolster his standing with the William Morris office—with Hollywood—where, despite the two dreadful B Westerns, Feudin’ Rhythm and Hoedown, Eddy Arnold made for Columbia Pictures in 1949, Parker had hoped to wield as big a stick as he had in the music business. He’d check into the Hotel Knickerbocker for a month at a time, trying to appear the part.
Now, all he could think of was something that occurred on his first trip to New York to meet Harry Kalcheim, who worked in the personal appearance division of the agency’s Gotham office. On the plane, Parker struck up a conversation with a man who bragged that he’d just made a big deal with William Morris. By coincidence, Parker noted, they were staying at the same hotel. But when the plane landed, the Morris office had a gleaming black limousine waiting for its important new client, while Parker was left to take the bus.
Several days later, Parker was having breakfast at the hotel when he looked out the window to see the big shot sitting on his suitcase. Now it was he who waited on a bus. “Where’s your limo?” Parker asked. “The deal fell through,” came the reply. Parker never forgot it, and it served as a harsh reminder of a very real truth: the minute you no longer had something the power brokers wanted, you were out.
“As the last of the carnies to really make it in Hollywood,” says Byron Raphael, “the Colonel was extremely jealous of the very well bred Jewish guys at William Morris. He resented them, and yet he also needed their respect. So although he made fun of the fact that he was accepted by what he considered to be the cream of New York and Hollywood, secretly he desired it terribly.”
Eventually, Parker would strike a deal with Arnold to handle at least a portion of his bookings, in part to save face with the Morris agency. But for the time being, he took another kind of solace.
“Plowboy,” he drawled into the phone, knowing how the name would irritate Eddy, “we’ve got to talk. You sent me this wire that said we was through, but you never said nothin’ about settlin’ up.”
“What do you mean?” Arnold asked.
“Well, if you’re not happy with me, and you don’t want to be associating with me anymore,” Parker said, “then it’s gonna cost you $50,000.” Arnold, conservative about nearly everything, and especially about money, swallowed hard and reminded Parker that they never had a contract, just a gentleman’s agreement. “No, Plowboy, there’s more to it than that,” the fat man said, and Arnold suggested they meet with his Nashville attorney, Bill Carpenter.
On the day of the appointment, Parker arrived at Carpenter’s office with an old leather bag stuffed full of papers, which he emptied into a small mountain on the lawyer’s desk—the IRS trick redone. As the lawyer began sifting through the pile, Parker took a folded paper from his pocket and started reading aloud from the last contract he’d negotiated for Arnold with RCA, one that gave the singer five cents a record, the largest royalty rate possible, equal to that of Perry Como.
Furthermore, Parker explained, the most favored nation clause dictated that if anybody negotiated a higher royalty rate in the future, Eddy got that, too. The agreement was good for seven years, Parker reminded them, and it carried his signature, not Eddy’s. Now, didn’t $50,000 seem reasonable, stacked against 25 percent of whatever royalties Arnold made for the remainder of those seven years? The singer sank deep in his chair. “Eddy,” Bill Carpenter said flatly, “pay him.”
For a man who had shied away from contracts, Parker had become exceptionally skilled in using them to his advantage. “Colonel Tom got me out of a contract one time that I didn’t want to be in,” recalled the country star Marty Robbins. “He did it as a favor. I was really hung up bad. Colonel Tom said, ‘Do you want out of that contract?’ I said, ‘Yes, sir.’ And sure enough, he got me out. I would have been hung up for six years at a big percent.” Robbins subsequently turned down Parker’s offer to sign him to Jamboree Attractions, but in pledging to work for the Colonel anytime he wanted, Robbins forged the kind of contract Parker liked best—an unwritten one.
And sometimes two contracts were better than one. Hank Snow, who became a partner in Jamboree Attractions in late 1954, lining up package tours for himself, Bill Haley and the Comets, Andy Griffith, Elvis Presley, and others, found out just how learned, and treacherous, Parker had become in early 1956, when the Colonel returned to Nashville from a trip to Memphis with dual contracts in his pocket.
The purpose of the trip had been to sign twenty-one-year-old Presley to a management deal. Gladys Presley distrusted the Colonel from the beginning, and Parker had called in Snow, one of her favorite singers, to sweet-talk Elvis’s mother into giving her approval. Now, if on the advice of his mother, Elvis balked at the first contract, which Parker carried in his left coat pocket, he had another one ready in his right. What Snow - didn’t learn until later was that the only difference in the contracts was that one bound Presley to Hank Snow Enterprises– Jamboree Attractions and the other strictly to Parker, as the “sole and exclusive Advisor, Personal Representative, and Manager in any and all fields of public and private entertainment.” It was the latter contract that Presley signed, forever cutting Snow out of the most lucrative deal in all of show business.