WHEN Priscilla and the co-executors petitioned Shelby County, Tennessee, probate court to allow Parker to continue representing the estate, they expected a quick rubber-stamping of the agreement. But Judge Joseph Evans was astonished to discover that the Colonel had been guaranteed half of Presley’s income while the singer was alive, and even more amazed that the estate would sanction such an arrangement now that Parker had no artist to manage.
As such, in a move that stunned the executors, he appointed a thirty-eight-year-old Memphis attorney, Blanchard E. Tual, to investigate Parker’s compensation agreement and to “represent and defend the interests of Lisa Marie Presley.” In legal terms, Tual was to act as the twelve-year-old’s guardian ad litem.
Tual spent four months looking into Parker’s financial dealings with the estate. On September 30, 1980, he filed a three-hundred-page report that concluded that it was inappropriate for the executors to rely on the January 22, 1976, agreement as a basis to continue a full relationship with the Colonel, and argued that “all agreements with Elvis Presley terminated on his death.” He recommended that the court not approve the 50 percent commission Parker received for administration, as it was “excessive, imprudent, unfair to the estate, and beyond all reasonable bounds of industry standards.” And he implored the court to immediately order all monies due the estate be paid directly to the executors and not to Parker, and to enjoin the executors from paying the Colonel any further commissions pending the conclusion of his investigation.
Finally, in what would become the most infamous part of the report, the lawyer, who had conferred with three nationally recognized music business attorneys, charged that Parker had been guilty of “self-dealing and overreaching” and that he had “violated his duty both to Elvis . . . and to the estate.” As proof, Tual cited the Boxcar agreement, which gave Parker 56 percent control of the company, apart from the 50 percent individual commission.
But the Colonel was not the only one who came under fire. The guardian ad litem also found fault in Parker’s handling of the royalty revenue from Presley’s publishing agreements. Tual chided the executors for not giving the Colonel definite guidelines and limits in writing, and for refusing to challenge Parker’s statements, which the guardian ad litem found “unsatisfactory” in failing to clarify if the figures were gross or net. Such reports, he said, were “totally unreliable in determining what actual monies passed through Parker’s hands.” He asked that the Colonel provide a statement of his present net worth as well as his past income tax returns, and he demanded that the executors secure a full audit from RCA, since Parker’s agreements did not contain the standard auditing clause customary in every recording contract. Additionally, Tual called for accountings from all of the entertainment companies with which Parker did business—from the William Morris Agency to Factors to the movie studios to Concerts West.
Tual’s findings rocked the music world and shocked Presley’s fans, as, rumors notwithstanding, no manager-client dealings had been as veiled as those of Colonel Tom Parker and Elvis Presley. Most agreed that the 50 percent commission was particularly egregious, since the majority of personal managers received 10 percent or 15 percent, and only rarely 25 percent. But the ratio was more complicated than it appeared. “I’m sure a lot of people see him as just this money-grubbing curmudgeon,” points out Parker’s friend Mike Crowley, “but it wasn’t fifty percent of everything.”
The Colonel, who reacted to the report with anger, was not without sympathy beyond his circle. Says music attorney and author Stan Soocher, “You can’t paint Parker as an angel, because the overreaching was clear. However, the particularities of the Elvis-Parker-RCA situation may not fully apply to the industrywide standard. A lot of this was a very tough call.”
“Most people would say [the 50 percent commission is] highway robbery,” concurs David Skepner, the manager who built country singer Loretta Lynn into a national figure. “But he was working under very abnormal conditions, including the drugs, so getting anything accomplished was a miracle.” And, points out RCA’s Joe Galante, “While he kept getting a higher proportion of the take, he was bringing in more revenues than other managers.”
Indeed, then, if Presley’s gross earnings totaled an estimated $200 million, why shouldn’t the man who wrangled such huge sums receive more than the industry standard, if not 50 percent? In 1968, the British journalist Chris Hutchins asked Parker about a wild rumor floating through the industry. “Is it true,” he ventured, “that you take fifty percent of everything Elvis earns?” For a moment, Parker seemed speechless. “No,” he finally answered. “That’s not true at all. He takes fifty percent of everything I earn.” And that’s the way he saw it. The Colonel spent many more hours plying the Elvis trade than Elvis did. And even though he had side deals with the very companies with whom Elvis did business—from RCA to the Hilton to Management III—Parker gave Presley undiluted attention in refusing to represent other acts on a grand scale.
Elvis himself never balked at the arrangement, and, echoes Barry Coburn, the manager who brought country singer Alan Jackson to prominence, the practices of the industry of the ’60s shouldn’t be compared to the business ethics of today. “How can you argue with the legacy that remains?” he asks, especially one that continues to influence managers and music executives alike.
In short, the Colonel was all the things that he appeared to be, both good and bad, and if Parker was the very definition of shrewd, the morality of his decisions was not always discernible as black or white.
Surprisingly, the estate itself had difficulty making that assessment. Less than three months after Tual delivered his first report and began gathering information for a second, the executors balked at the guardian’s requests. They argued that he had overstepped his authority and should be removed. They attempted to prevent Tual from continuing his investigation, a move the judge quickly quashed.
Dr. Beecher Smith III, one of the estate’s Memphis attorneys, denounced Parker as a “shaman” but also praised his doggedness (“When he was working for Elvis, he could negotiate the gold out of people’s teeth”). Furthermore, Smith cited “contractual barriers” to the recommendation that Parker no longer be a conduit for all of Presley’s income.
“I’m not prepared to paint Parker black,” Smith said some years later. “There were villainous elements, but . . . [he] was instrumental in establishing many of the things the estate benefits from today. His greatest sin was not being savvy about the state of the industry during the last five or ten years of Elvis’s life.”
In late 1980, as the investigation continued, Parker received what some considered fateful retribution when he suffered a fall at the RCA Building in Los Angeles, where he continued to keep an office on the seventh floor. Tripping at the entrance to the elevator, the old man lay beneath his own weight as the automatic door opened and shut repeatedly, breaking and slamming his right shoulder in relentless assault. The injury would forever limit the mobility of his arm and neck, and age him, in the opinion of friends, by ten years. Until he healed, he insisted that George Parkhill accompany him to the casinos to pull the handles on the slot machines; subsequently, he referred to the one-armed bandits as his “exercise.”
Shortly after the accident, Tual flew to California, where he held a meeting with Parker and the estate in the Colonel’s hospital room. In a newspaper interview in December 1980, the lawyer said he felt strange during the visit, expressing his surprise at how the executors “sandbagged” him and refused to question Parker’s 50 percent commission.
“I got the feeling the executors and the attorneys were afraid of Colonel Parker,” he said. “Every time he would laugh, they would laugh. Every time he said yes, they said yes.” Tual was stunned at the hold Parker seemed to have over the very people he had defrauded out of a fortune—$7 million or $8 million in the last three years alone, he estimated. But still he admired his cunning: “He had it from the eyebrows up.”
The guardian ad litem’s second report, delivered July 31, 1981, was even more damning than the first and elaborated on what Tual considered Parker’s poor management. Foremost was the RCA buyout (“the worst decision ever made in the history of rock ’n’ roll”), motivated, Tual charged, by Parker’s gambling debts and recent heart attack, and “the conscious decision to make as much money as he could from Elvis before his inevitable premature death.” Tual also hammered on the surprisingly low figure for which Elvis played Las Vegas and Parker’s failure to register Presley with BMI for performance royalties as a songwriter.
The latter discovery was a sweet victory for Joe Moscheo, the leader of the Imperials, whom Parker had treated so shabbily in Las Vegas. In 1978, the singer had left the road to go to work for BMI, where, in learning the system, he routinely checked up on royalties for his songwriter friends. Moscheo was bewildered when he typed in Presley’s name and saw “NA,” not affiliated.
“Elvis had thirty-three songs that he was credited as either writing or cowriting, including some big ones, like ‘All Shook Up,’ and he never received any writer performance royalties from BMI from 1955 to 1978,” says Moscheo. In investigating, he learned that “the Colonel would not allow Elvis to sign anything that Parker didn’t understand or agree to, and evidently, he didn’t understand what all of this performance thing meant. It was just an oversight, but there were hundreds of thousands of dollars that Elvis never received as a songwriter. Priscilla was furious.”
Tual was likewise enraged, but saved his knockout punch for Parker’s rampant “self-dealing.” He boldly charged the Colonel and RCA with “collusion, conspiracy, fraud, misrepresentation, bad faith, and overreaching,” asserting the record company paid off Parker to keep Elvis quiet and obedient while the label cheated “the most popular American folk hero of this century.”
The manager’s side deals with the company constituted a clear conflict of interest, Tual said, as “Colonel Parker could not possibly deal with RCA at arm’s length on Elvis’s behalf when he was receiving that much money from [the label].” As late as February 1980, RCA paid Parker $50,000 for “services with respect to promotion, merchandising concepts, and packaging suggestions.”
On August 14, 1981, when thousands of fans gathered in Memphis to pay tribute to Presley on the fourth anniversary of his death, Judge Evans ordered attorneys for the estate to halt further payments to the manager, as “the compensation received by Colonel Parker is excessive and shocks the conscience of the court,” the judge wrote in a heated opinion. Additionally, he required the executors to file suit against Parker for alleged fraudulent business practices and ordered an investigation into RCA Records’ dealings with Presley and the estate. Finally, the judge admonished the executors not to “enter into any future agreements with - Parker” without the court’s approval.
The Colonel was not in attendance, and his attorney, Jack Magids, denied all allegations of impropriety leveled against his client. Parker’s allies, speaking out in his favor, wondered if Tual’s report would have been different if the Colonel, then seventy-two years of age, were younger and healthier.
But Parker was fully capable of defending himself, he said in interviews with newspaper reporters. Courting the press where he’d once put a price on his time—$25,000 for small talk, $100,000 for a long conversation—he began to lift the curtain, if only slightly, around the great “Elvis and the Colonel” construct. Parker was shocked, he said in a written broadside, at what occurred in the probate proceedings, as he had made “every effort to honor [Elvis’s] name and preserve his memory and dignity.” Such allegations not only attacked Parker’s reputation, “but also are unfair and insulting to the memory of Elvis and his father, Vernon.” The fact that their relationship lasted twenty-one years “should say it all,” he added, and insisted “Elvis knew that I provided services for others. He was satisfied with our arrangement, and it worked.”
Yet within a month, as lawyers closed in and public sentiment turned vicious, Parker felt the need to speak again. The man with the hide of a rhinoceros had “nervous energy” in his voice as he talked with a reporter from the Memphis Press-Scimitar, insisting that Tual hadn’t given the whole picture of his relationship with the late singer. And for the first time, he criticized his client.
Far from being malleable and easily controlled, Elvis was “moody” and “headstrong,” Parker said, and had to be forced to honor his commitments. Though he refused to discuss Elvis’s drug problem, the Colonel hinted that theirs was not an easy relationship, and that Presley, lacking self-motivation, was often desultory, his actions unpredictable. “Sometimes,” he told the reporter in an uncharacteristic display of emotion, “it was such a heartache to keep [him] going.”
But what the Colonel really hoped to convey revolved around the issue of fiduciary trust. According to Parker, Elvis frequently refused his advice on important business deals. “He wanted to always make the final decision,” Parker said. “That’s the way it was. He had a mind of his own.”
At the heart of his argument was the RCA buyout, which the Colonel claimed was greatly misunderstood. “Keep in mind,” he said, “that Elvis approved all of the contracts with RCA. Elvis was fully aware of the entire transaction, and it was his decision. I had absolutely nothing to hide.”
Despite the fact that Presley’s older songs “weren’t selling” and earned very little, he said, “when [RCA] approached us about the buyout, I was not interested. I thought it was a stupid idea to even consider it.” However, both Elvis and Vernon “really pushed” for the deal and instructed Parker to counter the offer of $3 million. In getting the price to $5 million he ended the uncertainty of regular income from royalties. As a result, “Elvis’s decisions in 1973 were correct,” he maintained, adding that the agreement was “the best deal under the circumstances.”
The Colonel also patted himself on the back. Though he negotiated a new recording contract at the same time as the buyout, Parker said, Elvis failed to produce the required albums every year. To prevent the label from balking on the guaranteed royalty, the Colonel assembled tape recordings of live concerts, which RCA accepted in lieu of studio recordings. Thus, Parker argued, he kept Presley from violating his contract. As for having no auditing clause, most of the artists of the day didn’t have one, but he had been smart to insist on dollars and cents per unit protection.
Still, the accusations flew, and soon the executors took a different legal tack, asserting Parker never had a permit to act as Elvis’s manager. Yet with its limited resources—less than $5 million in real cash—the estate was on the brink of bankruptcy and loathe to tie itself up in expensive litigation, especially as the Internal Revenue Service had recently demanded payment of $14.6 million in additional taxes. The estate had undervalued Graceland itself, the IRS charged, as well as the worth of Elvis’s royalty rights for films, records, and television specials.
And, executors knew, Parker would fight back. In March 1982, he filed suit, calling his relationship with Elvis a partnership and citing the January 2, 1967, agreement as proof. (“I never saw anything to indicate it was a partnership,” says Tual.) The Colonel maintained he was due $1.6 million that he advanced Elvis in the months before his death, and asked a Nevada court to order the Presley estate liquidated. In the meantime, he sought the right to promote Presley’s name and to gain full control of the business that he and Elvis shared, the profits to be divided between him and Lisa Marie.
With litigation already stretching from California to Tennessee, in May 1982, RCA Records filed suit in U.S. District Court in New York against the executors, Tual, and Parker.
That’s when the Colonel played his toughest card.
Flushed out by Albert Goldman’s book Elvis, which in 1981 reported that Parker had been born Andreas van Kuijk in Breda, Holland, Parker spoke publicly for the first time about his European origins and forfeiture of his Dutch citizenship. In legal papers filed in response to the suit, he claimed that he could not be sued under federal law because “I am advised by my attorneys that the Court lacks jurisdiction over the subject matter of the complaint and the cross-claims herein, since I am not a citizen of the United States or any foreign country for purposes of diversity jurisdiction.”
Or, as Parker told Variety, “Yes, I am a man without a country.”
The revelation drew gasps from Parker’s acquaintances and spawned additional newspaper headlines. But still it failed to trigger an INS or FBI check. “That old son of a bitch was some kind of magician,” his foes whispered, “unless someone like Lyndon Johnson fixed things for him.”
But either Johnson acted in secrecy—a well-placed phone call, a discreet note on private stationery—or the oversight at the immigration service was exactly that. There is nothing in the Parker-Johnson correspondence to indicate the former president was cognizant of Parker’s citizenship problems.
Blanchard Tual likewise found no proof that Parker had been befriended by government leaders, and believed that Parker could still be sued in federal court, despite his claims to the contrary. But in June 1982, the estate, acting on the order from Judge Evans and following the directives of the Tual report, formally brought suit against the Colonel in Memphis Chancery Court. Charging contract manipulations and exploitation for personal gain—duping Presley out of more than $1 million—the executors asked that Parker’s rights to any contract with Presley and the estate be forfeited.
To bolster its claim, the estate cited six interrelated documents dated March 1, 1973, which paid Parker $6.2 million over a seven-year period, while Presley received $4.6 million. The agreements, all related to the RCA buyout, collectively provided the Colonel with 57 percent of all income, plus another 10 percent of RCA’s net profits from tours. (“I did not receive more than Elvis did from the music or the motion pictures, only for the extra deals I made,” Parker later insisted.) The lawsuit, which sought to negate Parker’s claim of a joint venture, also criticized the manager for failing to instigate tax and estate planning, and for refusing to set up foreign concert tours, presumably because Parker never obtained an American passport nor attempted to become a U.S. citizen.
But with the estate groaning under the weight of mounting legal fees, Tual and the executors reached an out-of-court settlement with Parker and RCA in November 1982, though full resolution wouldn’t be reached until the following June. Tual, who was well aware of Parker’s heart condition, had considered the Colonel’s ill health in making the decision. “We figured the Colonel might die before we finished litigation, and we would have to deal with his estate,” he says. But “if Elvis had lived and we tried a case against the Colonel, Elvis would have won.”
And yet in a nearly mythological display of fortitude to withstand any tide or torrent, Parker not only prevailed with another slick deal, but again succeeded in finding someone else to pick up his tab.
The settlement eliminated the Colonel’s future share of income and prohibited him from commercially exploiting the Presley name for five years. But in exchange for turning over master copies of Elvis’s audio recordings and 350 concert, movie, and TV clips to the estate, RCA would give Parker $2 million, doled out in payments of $40,000 a month—$60,000 each June—until May 1987. In addition, the Colonel collected $225,000 from the estate for his shares in Boxcar Enterprises, and agreed to provide it with a sampling of his vast Elvis memorabilia, including costumes, personal items, and stage paraphernalia. Now he felt vindicated. As he told his brother-in-law, “Bitsy, if I was doing something wrong, why are they trying to buy me out? Does that make sense?”
By the time the final documents were signed in 1983, the estate had undergone profound changes. Priscilla Presley and the board of directors were about to turn Elvis’s memory into a profitable business through the licensing of souvenirs, just as Parker had envisioned with Boxcar. They would also make Graceland a top tourist spot. Of the nation’s famous private residences, only the White House would receive more visitors each year.
Though the settlement demanded Parker sever ties with Priscilla and Lisa Marie, the Colonel had no such intent. Since the lawsuit began, he finagled a way to resume a relationship with both of them, sending Elvis’s daughter a toy, found in storage, that she had treasured as a child.
“A couple of weeks after we opened Graceland [in June 1982], someone walked into my office and said that a man is on the phone who says - he’s Colonel Parker,” remembers Jack Soden, CEO of Elvis Presley Enterprises. “I got on . . . and he said, ‘You’ve got a big challenge ahead. Call me anytime. This battle isn’t between you and me. You don’t have anything to do with it.’ ”
As Graceland developed into a $15-million-a-year business—sales of all things Elvis would top $37 million a year by 2002—the Colonel formulated his own strategy for cashing in on the legend. In the late ’80s, he began telling Elvis fans that he was opening his own museum, the Wonderful World of Show Business Exhibit, in his Madison home. Friends say he never really planned such a thing and simply hyped it as a bluff to sell Graceland the remainder of his memorabilia.
Still, he put up a convincing ruse, obtaining an occupancy permit, paving his front yard for a parking lot, and installing chain-link fencing and security lights. He also insisted that he had a Japanese bidder who offered top dollar. Though the negotiations would drag on for years, the estate would eventually cough up his $2-million asking price, the Graceland movers arriving in the dead of night to load an estimated thirty-five tons of material—business records, photographs, newsreels, telegrams, letters, artwork, acetate recordings, and Elvis’s famous gold lamé suit—into seven semi-trucks for their secret move to Memphis.
With the lawsuit resolved, the Colonel’s old friends rallied around him to help boost his reputation. In 1984, Janelle McComb, a Tupelo, Mississippi, friend of the estate who had spearheaded the building of the nondenominational chapel on the land behind the house where Presley was born, staged a private banquet for him in conjunction with a fund-raiser for the Elvis Presley Foundation. Rick Nelson—whom Parker casually counseled through his manager, Greg McDonald, a Palm Springs–based promoter and another of his “adopted” sons—performed a benefit concert. And the Colonel “signed” photographs of himself with a rubber stamp held in his left hand, leading the attendant members of Presley’s British fan club to wonder if the seventy-five-year-old had suffered a stroke.
At the same time the Colonel worked to redeem himself with the estate and Elvis’s fan base, he tried hard to mend his image in the industry. Since Elvis’s death, he had continued as a “consultant” for Barron Hilton, though he had worked without a contract since 1978. As he explained it, “I didn’t hear from them when the time was up, so I wrote them a nice thank-you letter and said, ‘If you ever need me,’ [and] I got a letter back [that] said, ‘Perish the thought of you ever leaving my team.’ ”
Many thought it was an arrangement by which Parker worked off a fraction of his gambling debts, as that same year, 1984, People magazine would report that the Colonel’s $30-million tab had been paid in full. The Colonel insisted his employment was anything but a way to write off his losses. “I’ve had offers far more financially better since those new [hotels] went up, but . . . [Barron] knows that I do a job.”
Despite his lofty title, Parker’s tasks harkened to those he performed as an advance man for the carnivals. While someone else booked the acts into the showroom, the Colonel handled promotions—arranging billboard rentals, finishing posters, and buying radio spots. He successfully teamed country singer George Strait with Jerry Weintraub to make the movie Pure Country after Strait broke Presley’s attendance record at the hotel. But Vegas old-timers saw him as little more than a public relations figure, a walking Elvis souvenir, the live companion to the Presley statue in the foyer. “Any time the Colonel came into view, it was the old Elvis picture from way back, even if he was just there in the casino,” says Variety’s Bill Willard.
Yet despite the enduring stardust of the Colonel’s name, by 1984 Barron Hilton had had enough of Parker’s escalating gambling tab. The rumor circulated that the hotel casino, like other places around town, had cut off Parker’s credit at the tables and relegated him to the $25 slot machines. It was a humiliating comedown.
While the Colonel was welcome to a small office in the hotel, the suite of rooms on the fourth floor was also no longer at his disposal, so Parker leased apartment 23G in Regency Towers, a high-rise located on the golf course in the Las Vegas Country Club Estates on Bel Air Drive behind the Hilton. Marie, a bedridden invalid from 1975 on, remained at the couple’s home in Palm Springs. In 1982, mute but still alert, she was operated on, and found to have a massive, benign brain tumor, undetected for perhaps twenty years. She would die in November 1986 of “chronic brain syndrome.”
“Marie’s a vegetable,” Parker would say point blank when anyone asked about her. “You wouldn’t want to see her now.”
And so Loanne moved to the high-rise with him and made it look like a home, replete with the Colonel’s vast elephant collection, which he proudly showed to visitors. Residents regarded the duo as wonderful neighbors.
On the surface, nothing had changed between Parker and the Hilton. In 1987, on the tenth anniversary of Presley’s death, the old entrepreneur brought Wayne Newton into the showroom for a tribute to Elvis, and the hotel opened Presley’s thirtieth-floor suite to the public. There, the Colonel set up a mini-museum of his life together with Elvis, plastering the walls with memorabilia and photos, and taking fans on guided tours of Presley’s bedroom. Though Parker was adamant that nothing be sold (“To me, that’s not a real tribute when you sell a lot of merchandise”), fans were given a free poster of the Colonel on the way out. The gesture did little to assuage the majority of Elvis’s faithful supporters, who still saw him as a black-hearted villain who traded the singer’s soul for the demon dollar.
To publicize the event, Parker appeared on Ted Koppel’s Nightline. (“He wanted me to come to New York—I said, ‘No, you bring a satellite to me.’ ”) From the start, the Colonel was combative, correcting the host and lambasting critics who charged that he stunted Elvis as an actor with a steady diet of beach ’n’ bikini movies. “If they know so much, they ought to go into the management business,” he huffed. “[Elvis] knew that he could do whatever he wanted.”
But at a Vegas press conference, he mostly waxed nostalgic. “I’ll never manage anyone again. After Elvis, where do you go?” It wasn’t true that the two never shared a meal, he said (“We may have had dinner three times a year”), and while Elvis had been the highest-paid performer in Vegas, “I feel ashamed to tell you what Elvis made for his shows back then.”
Still, he denied that he booked Presley for overlong engagements (“Elvis worked two-hour shows for two hundred nights a year. If you add that up, he worked about four months a year”), and insisted his client had only one goal that he never accomplished, and that was to “stay alive.” The Colonel feigned deafness when questions turned to drug use. “We’re here to honor his memory. I think I didn’t hear you very well.”
Parker steadfastly maintained that his only concern was to keep Elvis’s name before the fans. But others say the estrangement from the estate weighed heavily on his mind. When Alex Shoofey’s ex-wife visited him in the Elvis suite, he confided his dismay. “He thought he had been given the shaft, that the family had done him wrong, and Priscilla should have lived up to the deal,” says Joan Shoofey Richardson. “It was the only time I ever saw him angry.”
And so it was an emotional Parker who accepted Jack Soden’s invitation to come to Graceland for two days in June of ’87, both to talk about selling the remainder of his memorabilia (the estate would finally announce the acquisition in 1990) and to be welcomed back for special projects. Shortly after, a reporter asked if the visit held special memories. “None of ’em are memories for me,” the Colonel said. “You relive it every day.”
Seven months later, Parker was back in Memphis for the observance of what would have been Presley’s fifty-third birthday. Fierce snowstorms crippled the country, and although canceled flights turned his trip into a grueling two-day ordeal, Parker appeared humbled and on his best behavior at a gathering of media and fan club members. “Why did you come this year, Colonel?” someone shouted. “Well, it’s been too long,” Parker answered, casting an eager glance at Soden. “But things are working out.” Soden nodded his head. “Yes, they are, Colonel. Yes, they are.”
Wearing a round fur hat and a heavy camel’s hair coat, Parker resembled a friendly Khrushchev as he settled into a jovial mood. A woman from Arkansas cornered him, he joked, and told him of an Elvis séance. “I said, ‘I’ll give you my new phone number. Tell Elvis to call me.’ ”
“Colonel,” a woman chirped, “why did you decide to be Elvis’s manager?”
“I didn’t decide. I received a telegram from his father and mother asking if I could get Elvis a record contract. It just happened, that’s all.”
“Do you think if Elvis were living today,” called another voice, “he’d still be playing the same style of music?”
“Well,” Parker shot back, “let’s ask him that when I talk to that lady in Arkansas!”
And then it was over. “Okay,” he shouted off mike. “If you want a picture with the Colonel, no charge.” A woman stepped up. “Just don’t kiss me,” he said. “I got the measles.”
But when Parker appeared that evening at a Graceland-sponsored banquet, the fans greeted him with no more than polite applause, saving their enthusiasm for Steve Binder, the man who rejuvenated Presley’s career and spirit with the 1968 television special.
The Colonel poked fun at himself as he took the podium, and then made his peace with the producer he’d fought with years before. (“I don’t think there was any producer [who] could ever . . . get the talent out of Elvis like Steve.”) But when he quipped that his plaque should be larger than Binder’s (“Colonel, we’ll send it out and get you a bigger one,” he was assured), an undertow of disgust roiled through the crowd. “I think,” says Soden, “that Colonel Parker hoped history would treat him kinder.”
Certainly Priscilla Presley extended herself to him in ways that made many wonder if their legal settlement had amounted to an armed truce. Both Priscilla and Lisa Marie made a video to be played at the banquet, in which they said a “special hello to an old friend of ours” and lauded the manager-singer duo, one Priscilla guessed would never be duplicated “in the history of show business.”
Suddenly, the estate began spinning a revisionist take on the Presley-Parker past and planning an Elvis and the Colonel Museum. The two men “shared an abiding friendship that is often overlooked and misunderstood by the press and the general public,” as Soden later put it.
That stance put Soden and company in an awkward position when author Chet Flippo came down hard on the Colonel in the introduction to an estate-sanctioned book, Graceland: The Living Legacy of Elvis Presley. No one at Elvis Presley Enterprises read Flippo’s manuscript before it went to press, and Priscilla unsuccessfully put pressure on the publisher to pull the volume from distribution.
“As I recall,” says Flippo, “Parker read the book, blew up, and called Priscilla, who . . . demanded to have [it] killed.” The work was immediately removed from the Graceland gift shops, and the estate soon set up the Colonel Parker Tribute Committee to issue a thirty-two-page magazine, Elvis & Colonel Tom Parker: The Partnership Behind the Legend.
Like the estate, Barron Hilton was publicly loyal to the end. In June 1989, the hotel staged a gala dinner for the Colonel’s eightieth birthday, with former Tennessee lieutenant governor Frank Gorrell, who had long handled Parker’s charitable contributions, as master of ceremonies. Celebrities winged in on the Hilton’s tab, RCA executives hovered and fawned, and scores of others, including President George Bush, Bob Hope, and Bill Cosby sent cheery telegrams of congratulations. “They window-dressed it pretty nicely,” says Joe Delaney, the Las Vegas Sun columnist. “The Colonel held court.”
Two months earlier, the Colonel and Loanne (“a single man and a single woman,” as the deed read) jointly bought a town house in the Spanish Oaks area, an old, upgraded neighborhood. While $300,000 homes were not uncommon in the gated community, the residence was modest by comparison. They lived simply, shopping at Von’s grocery at Decatur and Sahara, where Parker often waited outside on a bench and talked to passersby while Loanne did the marketing. She bought his clothes off the rack at JC Penney.
By all accounts, Loanne was good for him. She hung on his every word, laughed at his stories, and bragged on him to others, seeking not so much respect for herself, but for him. More important, she served as an indispensable nurse, doling out his daily medications, watching his cholesterol and his diet to stave off the gout that swelled his extremities, and driving him to Elias Ghanem’s medical clinic for the slightest ailment, even as Parker’s loyalty to the doctor who gave his client so many drugs seemed to some perverse.
They made an odd couple—she tall and angular, towering over him; he, squat and shorter than anyone remembered, balancing his bulky body on a bamboo cane and leaning heavily on her arm in his increasingly unsteady walk. She was also his most vigilant watchdog. When Merilyn Potters, a reporter for the Sun, visited the house for an upbeat story to mark Parker’s birthday, she found the couple guarded, insisting on conducting the interview in the front courtyard instead of in their home. “He wouldn’t answer certain questions regarding Elvis,” Potters remembers. “And often, when he began to ramble, [Loanne] put the lid on.” Her usual technique: Glancing over and raising an index finger to halt him if she thought he revealed too much.
“I think the Colonel was sharp enough to realize that he needed a guardian,” offers Joe Delaney. “Loanne was a completely faithful servant.”
And so, at the urging of Mae Axton, Parker married Loanne at the home of lawyer John O’Reilly on October 26, 1990. The Colonel was then eighty-one; Loanne, who took on the unofficial title of Mrs. Colonel, fifty-five.
A month after the ceremony, Parker signed a will that established a trust for talented youngsters, left monetary gifts to friends, and provided for his new wife. What few people knew was that in relative terms, the Colonel was no longer a wealthy man.
While he remained a loyal contributor to the Sun camp fund for needy children, donating $14,000 in the last six years of his life (“buying his soul out of hell,” charged one wag), he largely lived off U.S. Treasury bonds, which he’d let mature and roll over. Occasionally, he put in appearances at fund-raisers around town (including one for presidential candidate Bill Clinton, whose mother, Virginia Kelley, became a gambling buddy), but the invitations were gratis, and Loanne kept her eye on every penny. Though he still sent cash to treasured acolytes at Christmas, twice in coming years Parker would add codicils to his will to reduce or rescind his financial gifts.
“Loanne hoarded money to keep him from pissing it away at the tables,” as Jackie Kahane recalled. While the Colonel gambled, she sat quietly, reading a book.
Privately Loanne told people Parker was often cold to her, but in public their interaction was playful and childlike. “He said, ‘Without her, I - wouldn’t be living,’ ” remembers a friend. “And when she’d try to give him his pills, they would just fuss, but that was part of the game. They were like two little kittens. She added those extra years to his life.”
In the early ’90s, the Colonel suffered what some said was his second stroke. Milder than the first, it was still an ominous sign, given the correlation between strokes and heart disease, the twin harbingers of the death that was beginning to take the lives of so many of his family members in Holland. Josephus, the eldest boy, had died in 1984, and then Adriana, the eldest girl, succumbed in 1989, eight years after she had written her estranged brother in America, begging to hear word of him. Her letter had been hand-carried by the Colonel’s onetime compatriot, Lamar Fike, who, working with the Dutch reporter Dirk Vellenga, helped Albert Goldman uncover Parker’s European past.
“When his sister walked into that room in Breda, I almost had a heart attack—she looked like a twin of Tom Parker. It was like finding out your daddy wasn’t who he said he was.” The Colonel just stared at Fike when he put the letter in his hand and “didn’t make a comment either way.” Adriana received no reply.
Now Engelina was ill with cancer and wanted to tell her brother goodbye. In November 1989, her daughter, Mieke Dons-Maas, introduced herself to Bill Burk, the American publisher of Elvis World magazine, at a meeting of the Dutch Elvis Presley fan club. She asked his help. Burk directed her to the Las Vegas Hilton, and for months, she faxed Parker letters and left phone messages, but all went unanswered.
Finally, Burk gave her Parker’s private number. Mieke got Loanne on the line and explained she was the Colonel’s niece. In halting English, she told her of her mother’s last request, and of how the other family members loved their brother Dries and cried at the mention of his name. Loanne listened patiently, went to deliver the message, and returned with one curt sentence: “The Colonel said he doesn’t wish to speak with anyone from Holland.”
The family remains mystified as to why Parker refused contact. “I suppose he just wanted to cut those ties and any information about Holland muddied the history he had created for himself,” says Mieke.
Unless, that is, his fate had become entwined with that of Anna van den Enden sixty years before. If so, a second tragedy for Parker, his family, and his famous client may have been the Colonel’s ignorance of the fact that he was never named in the police report for the murdered woman. Under Dutch law, the longest any suspect would have been wanted for questioning was thirty years, and then only if he had been sought or accused. After 1959, whoever knew the ultimate truth about the death of Anna van den Enden was a free man, able to travel the world without restrictions.
Loanne insists Parker was proud of being a Dutchman, and “spoke with great love and affection about his country. He never forgot his roots.” Certainly they were often on his mind. He made his charitable contributions on his birthday, a European custom. And in casual conversation, he told acquaintances that he and Loanne had adopted a son, poignantly producing a picture of a large, clubfooted rag doll. Its name: Andre.
Still, he remained diffident about all old-world contacts. When a young Dutch couple, Angelo Somers and Hanneke Neutkens, sent him a $100 box of cigars with a letter explaining their wishes to establish a Colonel Tom Parker Foundation in Breda, he returned their carefully decorated gift unopened. Dutch newsmen fared no better. Constant Meijers tracked him down at a slot machine in the Hilton casino and explained his plans to make a documentary film about Parker’s integral role in the history of rock music. The man who’d once threatened to have a publicist’s job because she had not included him in photographs now wanted nothing to do with the media in his native country.
“He talked a little bit of Dutch to me, and then he held on to the coins with one hand, and he waved me away with the other, saying, ‘You’re from Holland? Thank you, no, bye-bye. I know about Holland, I’ve been there.’ ”
Freelance videographer Jorrit van der Kooi had a similar experience, approaching Parker at the slots on his birthday. Van der Kooi spoke to him in Dutch, and after a brief exchange about Parker’s heritage, delivered the news that Ad van Kuijk, the brother who had visited Parker in the States, had died. The Dutch journalist was rebuffed in his attempt to snag an interview, but captured chilling footage of his angry subject. As van der Kooi’s camera whirred on, the Colonel, wearing dark cotton gloves to keep the handle from sullying his hands, continually poured what was left of his fortune into the eager slots, his face contorted with rage.
Though his stroke had left him weak, he still went out for lunch every day, and then on to the Hilton—nothing kept him from the twilight world of the Las Vegas casinos, where the ringing of the slot machines sounded like so many old-time carnival bells, and the croupiers called out like pitchmen. Loanne helped him into a wheelchair and pushed him through the crowds to the high-roller section.
“He continued to gamble until the day he died,” remembers Nick Naff. “But it’s awful hard to play roulette from a wheelchair, so he would sit and have two or three people pull the slot machines for him.” Usually, he insisted on feeding the machines himself—sometimes four at once—but often he was so feeble or stiff that he dropped the tokens, attendants scrambling to pick them up for him as they skittered across the floor.
When the occasion called for it, however, he could rally, as he did at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Elvis Presley commemorative postage stamp at the Hilton in January 1993.
Inside Edition reporter Craig Rivera covered the event, mostly to corner Parker for comments on Elvis and the Colonel: The Untold Story, a made-for-TV movie set to air later that month, starring Beau Bridges in a dismally unflattering portrait of the man who made the King.
Parker denied he was upset by the portrayal (“Now, when they’ve done all they could with [Elvis], they’re pickin’ on me a little”), but found himself in his toughest interview yet. He denied trading Elvis’s services for gambling debts (“My gambling has never had anything to do with Elvis”), and laid the blame on Presley for never playing overseas (“I had a whole staff that could go to Europe with him. He didn’t want to go, because he didn’t want to play outdoors, and if you don’t play outdoors, you can’t make it”).
Finally, Rivera skewered him on the 50 percent commission, which Parker still defended as a partnership arrangement. “I know of four or five big stars that have a deal like that. But my deal was not fifty percent of the profit. My deal was fifty percent of work I created where he did not have to perform . . . On the motion pictures, the hotel, and the music business, twenty-five percent. Never no more. I sleep very good at night. And Elvis and I were friends.”
The Colonel would be uncharacteristically sentimental about his client in latter years, telling reporters, “Every once in a while I sit by myself in my old rocking chair and talk to myself about Elvis . . . Some of the best deals we made were when we argued together [because] we came up with a better solution . . . It’s hard to convince people how close you can be to someone.”
And with reason. When Chris Hutchins visited Parker at home in 1993 for a book he was writing on Elvis and the Beatles, he was surprised to find the Colonel’s “secret shrine” to Presley, made up of letters, telegrams, and photographs. Yet he found Parker as emotionally hard-shelled as ever.
“Do you miss him?” Hutchins asked. “Frankly no” came the reply. “There’s no point missing what you haven’t got.” The reporter gazed at the vast collection of gold records lining Parker’s hallway. “Which of these records do you play the most?” he inquired. “None of them,” Parker said. “The only records I keep are business records. That’s what he paid me for.” In fact, the manager was fond of relating, he never took the time to listen to Elvis’s last three albums or watch his final movies.
But down deep, Hutchins probed, wasn’t Elvis the son the Colonel never had? The bulbous body leaned forward. “I have to be honest,” Parker answered. “I can’t say yes to that one either. I never looked on him as a son, but he was the success I always wanted.”
Normally, Parker told interviewers, he was saving his Elvis stories for his autobiography, which he planned to call How Much Does It Cost If - It’s Free? His would be only a favorable account. “I’ve turned down more books for big money . . . a $2-million advance . . . because my story, they will not print. They said, ‘No, we want the dirt.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m not a dirt farmer.’ ”
Parker had been claiming the autobiography was under way since 1957, of course, leading one journalist to muse that the book “seemed designed more to intimidate a number of lifelong business acquaintances than to herald a switch to the world of letters.” The Colonel waved off such critics. “I got the book right up here,” he would say, tapping his forehead. “I don’t know if a guy should put out a book too soon if he’s still alive . . . if I were to expire before completing it, Mrs. Parker here has all the information to finish it.” But as late as 1994, he privately admitted he had yet to write the first word. “He freezes,” Loanne said, “when I take out a tape recorder.”
“I teased him about it a couple of times,” remembers Bill Willard. “I saw him at breakfast over at Leo’s Celebrity Deli and I said, ‘How’s the book coming along?’ And he grumbled and grumped and turned away. [Loanne] looked at me and just shook her head.”
By then, most of Parker’s oldest friends were dead or dying, unable to confirm or deny the Colonel’s mythology. When he wasn’t in the casino or working for Barron Hilton, he said, he spent his time reading. “I’ve got plenty to do . . . I think a lot . . . People take up exercise, you know, but I exercise my brain.”
To do so, he wrote doggerel poetry and sent it to friends such as Jerry Weintraub. And even though he still got up at five A.M., he watched Elvis’s movies on late-night TV. But he was more entranced by the television evangelists, particularly Pat Robertson, who built a $20-million studio with viewers’ contributions, Parker told one visitor, a gleam in his eye. And he never quit dreaming up promotions, entering into a business deal with Vegas entrepreneur Hank Cartwright to sell back-to-the-’50s memorabilia via catalogue.
Mostly, he stayed on the telephone and dictated letters to Loanne, who wondered why there were no Colonel fan clubs in Europe, considering the amount of overseas mail he received.
“He just got lost after Elvis died,” says June Carter Cash, whom Parker represented in the early ’50s. “He would send me little notes saying he was still thinking about me and still loved me—anything to make him feel like he was close to the old days and to the things that really started it all.”
While he took great pride in boasting how many old pals like Gene Autry and others kept in touch (“Eddy [Arnold] calls me probably at least once a month”), the truth was that he often did the calling, greeting familiar voices with his usual “kid, how you doin’?” He particularly made comforting calls to the sick, phoning the cancer-riddled Alan Fortas every Sunday, and keeping in daily contact with British fan club president Todd Slaughter after Slaughter’s heart transplant in 1994.
“He was a lonely old man who came over from a foreign country alone and terrified,” says a friend of thirty years, “and he didn’t know how to accept somebody who loved him for just being the Colonel. But he wanted to be loved more than anybody I ever knew.”
Others saw it, too. Elvis’s piano player, Tony Brown, thought Parker had mellowed in old age, finding him surprisingly “very nice” when the two met again in the Colonel’s last years. To some extent, it seemed to be true. Though he never forgave Byron Raphael for leaving the fold and largely cast him out “like a king would banish you from the court,” as one observer notes, he made up with a number of people he had cast aside—the still-infatuated Trude Forsher, for example—or whose feathers he had ruffled, including Julian Aberbach and Lamar Fike. “We hadn’t spoken in probably ten years,” says Fike. “He said, ‘Do you still love me?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I still love you. How could I not, for crying out loud? You’re part of my life.’ He acted like nothing ever happened.”
But he never lost his paranoia. When psychologist-author Peter Whitmer contacted him for an interview for his book The Inner Elvis: A Psychological Biography of Elvis Aaron Presley, Parker felt so threatened he telephoned Joe Esposito and Henri Lewin, the retired president of the Hilton, and “warned them about what to say.” And after the publication of Elvis Meets the Beatles, author Chris Hutchins was shocked to get an irate phone call, Parker “shouting very loudly” because Hutchins had written about the Colonel’s secret shrine. “It wasn’t like a manager lecturing an errant journalist. It was more like a father telling off his son—he was quite a bitter old boy.”
The real problem, says Lamar Fike, is that Parker expected to die by age seventy and never thought he’d outlast his enemies. And if living to old age was his punishment, Parker began wearing every day of it on his face and on his body. His eyes still snapped, but his skin—so thin it seemed translucent—was speckled with liver spots, the backs of his hands mottled to an almost solid brown. His flesh hung in crepelike folds at his neck; his eyes sank into bottomless blue wells. Plagued by congestive heart disease and a recurring bronchitis that often slipped into pneumonia, he looked not old, but ancient. His arthritis was so painful that he sometimes canceled engagements, and it took all his strength to hoist his weight off a chair. But, he insisted, “I’m healthy up in my mind.”
For the most part, he pretended all was well, keeping secret his hospital stays and appointments with several cardiologists. If people asked why he’d given up his beloved cigars, he claimed they cost too much and never mentioned his persistent cough or difficulty breathing. When he insisted on going to Los Angeles to take the children of one of his favorite vendors to the circus, he faltered, out of breath and ghostly pale, on the walk to the top of the arena.
He made his last two major public appearances in 1994. In March, he returned to Palm Springs for the ceremony to unveil three stars in the sidewalk at the corner of Palm Canyon Drive and Tahquitz Canyon Way—one for Elvis, one for Rick Nelson, and the last for Parker, an honor arranged by the Colonel’s former protégé and Nelson’s manager, Greg McDonald. That June, the Hilton threw a sumptuous bash for his eighty-fifth birthday, and Priscilla Presley, among others, flew in from Los Angeles.
Only a month before, Parker had spoken brazenly of Lisa Marie’s marriage to Michael Jackson, spewing disdainfully that Elvis would not have approved. And he had taken other jabs at the estate, insisting he had never “exploited Elvis as much as he’s being exploited today.” Yet at the party, all seemed well. Jack Soden testified to his help and suggestions in running Graceland since it opened to the public, and Priscilla dutifully hugged and kissed the Colonel and Loanne. “I’m still working for you, Elvis,” an emotional Parker said, wiping his eyes and pointing a finger skyward. He’d arrived in a golf cart, not wishing to use his wheelchair. Everyone knew this was the last of the big birthdays.
Throughout 1995, his health continued to deteriorate. When his old friend Gabe Tucker saw him the following year, “he knew he was dyin’. He never said nothin’ about it, but he didn’t want us to go. God, he was in bad shape. I seen him breakin’ fast.” By September 1996, he was essentially housebound. But still potent and quick with advice. He entertained a few visitors such as Jimmie Dale Gilmore, the Texas singer managed by Parker acolyte Mike Crowley. Gilmore was enchanted: “He said Elvis was as hard a worker as he ever knew, and it looked like tears were coming to his eyes.” Anyone who demonized the Colonel, Gilmore said, “will never convince me.”
Such visits buoyed him. “In the last years,” Freddy Bienstock offers, “he had hardly any business. People had shunned him, or he shunned them. He would tell me I was the closest friend he had.” The two last spoke in November 1996. “I was supposed to go out that fall, and I told him I couldn’t make it, but I’d definitely be there in February. And he said, ‘I’ll be here. I’m not going anywhere.’ ”
But by December, the Colonel could barely speak. When friends called, Loanne had to talk for him and relay messages back and forth. Still, at eighty-seven, he clung to his entrepreneurial dreams. In one of his last visits with Jerry Weintraub, they schemed about putting their own relationship on film.
“He was my mentor, my teacher, my father figure,” says Weintraub. “He told me he loved me, and I said, ‘I love you, too,’ and I kissed him, and he kissed me. I’m glad we had that moment.”
On Monday afternoon, January 20, 1997, Parker was at home in his living room, perusing a pile of Christmas cards and letters. Loanne, in another room, suddenly heard a thud. She called out to no answer, and found him slumped in his chair. The Colonel had suffered a stroke.
At Valley Hospital, Loanne got on the phone and called her husband’s circle. Bruce Banke, Parker’s loyal contact at the Hilton, arrived to find the Colonel still in the emergency room. Banke leaned over and took his hand. “Colonel, it’s Bruce.” The old man opened his eyes, squeezed his friend’s finger, and then faded. “I was the last person he saw,” Banke says. “He never regained consciousness.” The following morning, just before ten, he died. Loanne arranged for his cremation, though the final resting place of his ashes—not in Palm Cemetery, as reported—would become as mysterious as the rest of his peculiar life. His death certificate would list his birthplace as Holland but his citizenship as American.
Four days later, the invitation-only guests who filtered into the service at the Hilton were a predictable lot, a few famous faces—Eddy Arnold, Sam Phillips—mixed in with hotel honchos, record company execs, highbrow carnies, and swarthy men in dark, monied suits. Elvis-ographers large and small paid their respects, as did Phyllis McGuire, once Sam Giancana’s girlfriend. Ron Jacobs, the radio personality Parker had befriended in Hawaii so long ago, draped a fresh maile lei around a giant picture of the Colonel.
Almost no one noticed Tom Diskin, who after leaving Parker’s employ upon Elvis’s death, had finally made a life for himself, marrying a French Elvis fan and producing a daughter. Scrimping through the years, he had nonetheless invested his stock and bonuses wisely, buying a luxurious California mansion before moving back to Nashville. He would die the following year in a traffic accident, leaving a multimillion-dollar estate, much of it in property and land.
As with the classic ant-and-grasshopper tale, the boss Diskin had come to mourn this January afternoon—a man who had earned an estimated $100 million from Elvis Presley alone—left behind only $913,000 in savings bonds, securities, and memorabilia. Much of that would go to Marie’s grandchildren, Parker’s secretary Jim O’Brien, and Mary, Patti, and Tom Diskin—hush money, some would say. The charitable trust disappeared in probate.
“How and where do you begin to celebrate the memories of a man - who’s been so dear to us?” asked Parker’s Las Vegas lawyer and master of ceremonies, John O’Reilly.
Speaker after speaker sobbed in eulogizing “a very emotional man,” whose eyes “were but windows to the world of kindness and love.” Jerry Schilling read a letter from Tommy Sands, who thanked the Colonel for making all his dreams come true, and Henri Lewin remembered that “to work with him was actually working for him.” “You and Elvis are together again,” Lewin mourned in his heavy German accent. “I know you both looked forward to this moment.”
Of those who lauded the man who had promoted his client’s name into the consciousness of two generations, only Priscilla Presley was matter-of-fact. “Elvis and the Colonel made history together, and the world is richer, better, and far more interesting because of their collaboration. And now I need to locate my wallet, because I noticed there was no ticket booth on the way in here, but I’m sure that Colonel must have arranged for some sort of toll on the way out.”
Loanne, who announced she hoped one day to erect a monument to such a great man, had planned carefully for this day, accenting her simple dress with a glittering diamanté brooch fashioned in the shape of a snowman. But Mrs. Colonel had none of her late husband’s power.
The new head potentate was Priscilla Presley, who, in a year’s time, would send her late ex-husband back out on the road to fulfill his dream to tour abroad. “Elvis: The Concert” would pair live performance from fifty of Presley’s former instrumentalists and singers with video of their old boss on stage. For two hours, a virtual Elvis, circa 1970–1973, would sing, strut the stage, show off his karate moves, and mumble to the band, all on a twenty-foot screen.
Colonel Parker’s idea for the satellite-beamed “Aloha from Hawaii” had been brilliant—Presley traveled the world without ever having to leave the States. But now Elvis wasn’t even required to be alive. His jumpsuited specter would sell out shows and earn rave reviews in America, Europe, Australia, and Japan, many fans reporting the event was as good or better than seeing him in the flesh.
Such bodacious sleight of hand was a weird and wonderful bit of humbuggery, a tribute befitting the greatest carny con man of them all.