The Colonel

THE COLONEL

Alanna Nash is a feature writer for the
New York Times
and
Entertainment Weekly
, who has written five books, including
Elvis Aaron Presley: Revelations
from the Memphis Mafia
(“the best Elvis book written to date” –
Uncut
). She lives in Louisville, Kentucky.

“For all Presley’s talent,
The Colonel
successfully makes a case that Presley would not have become an icon of American popular culture without
Parker’s machinations; he was the key architect of Presley’s career—for both good and bad.”

—Fred Goodman,
New York Times

“Ranks alongside Fred Goodman’s
The Mansion on the Hill
and Frederic Dannen’s
Hitmen
as a classic of music industry reporting.”

—
Billboard

“A commendably temperate and serious treatment of a story that could have tempted a lesser writer to sensationalism. . . . Nash tells in unprecedented and meticulous
detail the full story of Parker’s real history and his audacious posing.”

—David Hajdu,
New York Review of Books

“Nash doesn’t ask us to forgive Parker, or even like the man, but rather to understand him as a hopeless emotional f**k-up, not the one-dimensional monster most
Elvis storytellers resort to. She succeeds, brilliantly. . . . Bloody good read.” Five stars.

—
Uncut

“The most incisive and comprehensive look at the life of the elusive Colonel available.”

—
Mojo

A
LSO BY
A
LANNA
N
ASH

Elvis Aaron Presley: Revelations from the Memphis Mafia
(with Billy Smith, Marty Lacker, and Lamar Fike)

Elvis: From Memphis to Hollywood
(with Alan Fortas)

Golden Girl: The Story of Jessica Savitch

Behind Closed Doors: Talking with the Legends of Country Music

Dolly

For Maria Dons-Maas,
who searches still for her
Uncle Andreas

Cunning and deceit will serve a man better than force to rise from a base condition to great fortune.

—Niccolò Machiavelli

N
O
sane person goes to Memphis in the month of August, when the air, rolling off the hard-by Mississippi
River, hangs sticky sweet and damp, and the simplest inhalation feels like breathing through burlap. But on August 17, 1977, nothing would have kept me from this place. The day before, Elvis Aaron
Presley, the greatest entertainer of the twentieth century and a social force beyond measure, watched his life ebb away on the bathroom floor at his beloved Graceland.

Now I stood only yards below that bathroom window, numb with confusion at the surreal events that had brought me to the grounds of the most private of rock and roll estates. At twenty-seven, I
had been reviewing pop music for
The Louisville Courier-Journal
for only a few months, but my fanatical interest in the subject dated to Presley’s first appearance on
The Ed
Sullivan Show
in 1956. How could the King of Rock and Roll be dead at forty-two?

I stepped to the edge of the press pool and gazed down the long driveway. There, to the soft sounds of crying, scores of fans who had succumbed to heat and grief lay prostrate on the grass.
Behind them, thousands of mourners stood in line behind the famed gates that bore the resemblance of the man who lay in his casket inside Graceland’s foyer. All of us were waiting to hear the
same news—the hour when the public visitation might begin.

It was then that Dick Grob, head of Presley’s security, walked out of the house and stopped where I was standing with John Filiatreau, a respected
Courier-Journal
columnist who
had flown down with me on the company plane.

Grob raised his bullhorn: “Any members of the press who want to
view the body, line up behind these two,” he announced, and put his hands on our shoulders. The
single rule: no lingering—the line must move at all times. I turned to John. “You first,” I said, and he obliged me as we made our way inside.

There before us, in a large copper-lined casket, lay a swollen figure dressed in a white business suit, a blue dress shirt, and a silver tie, his skin a white and waxy hue.

A woman cried out: “He looks like a tub!”

Not to me, he didn’t. But he also didn’t look like Elvis Presley. I went through the line again, my mind racing with the possibilities of a hoax, a plausible explanation for the
unthinkable. When I tried to ease my way through a third time, a guard pulled me out. “You’ve been through twice,” he said. “Only get one shot.”

Today, I have no doubt that Elvis Presley occupied that coffin. But in 1977, as eager as I was to gaze once more at that famous face, one man refused to look at all.

“It’s so strange,” remembers Larry Geller, a member of Presley’s entourage who styled Elvis’s hair for his funeral. “We all wore our black suits. But Colonel
Parker wore a Hawaiian floral shirt and a baseball cap. And never walked up to the casket. Very strange. Very strange, indeed.”

“D
ID
you see it?” the old man asked, shifting his mountainous heap of flesh to the edge of the
chair, his eyes open wide and twinkling. “What a hell of a thing! Unbelievable!”

It was June 18, 1994, the day after O. J. Simpson’s infamous Bronco run, and Colonel Tom Parker, with his attentive wife, Loanne, at his side, held court for two visitors at the
N’Orleans Restaurant, a meat ’n’ two joint in a run-of-the-mill strip mall named Lucky’s on the outskirts of the gambling capital of the world.

Like the rest of the country, Parker had been mesmerized by Simpson’s bizarre highway chase. But now his reaction, with his face momentarily frozen in awe, spoke silently of something
else—not of a fascination with sports or the subtleties of race relations, but of a sort of perverse pride, perhaps, in an elite and remarkable fraternity of rogues. Or at the very least, in
a man who had taken a terrible risk, and managed to beat the odds.

This was my second of three visits with Parker, whose own survivor instincts so defied description that many thought him indestructible. Yet less than three years later, also in Vegas, far from
his birthplace of Breda, Holland, where he first learned the art of the hustle as an errand boy in Dutch fairs, circuses, and carnivals, he succumbed to the complications of a stroke at the age of
eighty-seven.

A master illusionist in business and in the business of life, Tom Parker made things appear and disappear at will, and created something very great out of nothing—including himself. Out of
respect for that, if nothing else, I went back to say good-bye.

The giant marquee outside the Las Vegas Hilton was both sweet and succinct (
FAREWELL
,
COLONEL PARKER
), but
not everybody knew what it meant.

“You here to gamble?” asked my taxi driver, who had shuttled me in from the airport on a late January day in 1997 and who had uttered not a word until tip time.

“No, I’m going to the memorial service for Colonel Parker.”

A beat. “Dat the fried chicken guy?”

At least one cynical obituary writer, Serene Dominic, seconded that thought in a
Phoenix New Times
article headed “Cooked the Colonel’s Way—Colonel Tom Parker Has
Kicked the Bucket, and the Original Recipe for Rock ’n’ Roll Rotisserie Goes with Him.” But the 160 mourners who filtered into Ballroom D saw him as one of the last giants and
true iconoclasts of the century—a penniless immigrant who slipped into the country, befriended U.S. presidents and corporate CEOs, created both an icon and a $4-billion business, and never
let any of it get in the way of what mattered most—playing the game.

Through it all, he remained as individualistic, as shrewd, rude, crude, and fun-loving as ever. At his death, he still delighted in practicing what he called the art of “snowing,”
the exquisitely performed act of separating people from their money, leaving them with a smile on their face and melting away before they realized what had taken place.

While some would argue that Parker’s very body was a temple to gluttony, greed, and feeding off the dimmer wits of others, it was the Snowman his friends had come to honor this day, his
widow, Loanne, posing an intriguing question.

“I want to leave you with just one thought,” she said, addressing the crowd, which had passed a lobby-card-size photo of the couple at the entrance. “If Thomas A. Parker had
never existed, how would each of your lives be different today?”

One person who couldn’t answer that question was Elvis Aaron Presley, whose piped-in versions of “Memories” and “How Great Thou Art” opened and closed the service
with ghostly reverence. The Elvis Presley who had first come to Vegas in 1956 as an acne-faced adolescent left it twenty years later as a pathetic, corseted cartoon, his body blown from years of
abuse, his spirit picked hollow.