Authors: Alanna Nash
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.