Authors: Alanna Nash
However, as Parker became more prosperous, he began to lavish luxuries on Marie. In Florida, the old-timers insist that Marie was always a rung above her husband on the social ladder, even with
her impoverished origins and wild behavior. While others find it hard to believe (“Let’s say she wasn’t too much with the social graces—they were two of a kind, and nothing
was ever going to change them,” ventures RCA publicity director Anne Fulchino), Marie’s union with Parker would, in time, allow her to reinvent herself, despite her husband’s own
rough manners.
As Maria van Kuijk had done, Marie would use the carriage of matrimony to separate from her past and rise to a higher social level, replete with the attendant costume jewelry, high-end clothing,
and an endless array of shoes, remembering how, during the Depression, she’d worn cardboard liners to cover the holes in the soles. “She had a twelve-foot closet just for coats,”
says her daughter-in-law Sandra Polk Ross, including a full-length white mink for which she went to New York to pick out the pelts. The irony was that other than when she traveled (“She was
the only person I knew who brought her whole big jewelry chest with her,” recalls Ann Dodelin, whose husband, Ed, was RCA’s national record sales manager), she mostly kept her finery
put away, preferring a more
modest way of dress in public. She was happiest, some say, playing poker with her best friend, Mother Maybelle Carter.
Parker denied her almost nothing, because, as his acolyte and friend the booking agent Hubert Long once observed, she was “the Colonel’s stable base.” Yet something about his
psychological make-up made him unable to discard worn-out, useless objects. He directed Marie’s thinking along the same lines, even to moldy food left too long in the refrigerator. On
occasion, people took notice.
During his years with Arnold, Parker forged a close friendship with the well-known country disc jockey and promoter Connie B. Gay, who operated out of the Washington, D.C., area. Plainspoken and
earthy (he once described Hank Williams as “a goner, just a pile of shit mixed with alcohol and pills”), Gay had worked as a huckster and street-corner salesman during the Depression,
gathering a crowd by holding up a Gila monster and announcing, “I’m gonna eat this thing!”
When the Colonel first acquired Elvis, it was natural that he continue the association with his old friend. He allowed Gay to book Presley on one of his country music cruises down the Potomac in
March 1956, but “It was the only time I didn’t fill the boat,” Gay recalled. “There was an engine problem and we couldn’t take off. A lot of people wanted their money
back, so I paid them and they missed Elvis.”
Still, Gay’s children, daughter Judy and son Jan, remember that their parents and the Parkers were so close that Tom and Marie always stayed at the house when they were anywhere near the
area, and the teenagers were told that they would go live with the Parkers if anything ever happened to Connie and Hazel.
On one such visit, Judy, a huge Elvis fan whom Parker named the honorary president of the national fan club, sat wide-eyed as Marie dug to the end of her lipstick tube with a little brush. From
the conversation, Judy got the impression Marie wasn’t allowed to buy more until she’d used every last bit. “Later, Mother said, ‘Well, if you knew Tom, you’d know
why.’ ”
Each time the Parkers came, the Gay children saw their mother wait on Tom hand and foot, cooking the foods he liked and ate in enormous quantities. Hazel timed her banana pudding so it would be
warm for his arrival, and the teenagers watched as their father and Tom, whom they remember as “an old, fat, nice guy, always schemin’ with Daddy on how to make a buck with the
hillbilly trade,” put away bowls of the stuff, reminiscing about the early years.
“One reason Tom always stayed with us was so he could save a hotel bill,” says Jan. “This one time, we’d put him up for days, and as he started to
leave, he said, ‘Hazel, I’d like to give you a little somethin’ for your hospitality.’ And he handed her a bag of all of the little hotel soaps -he’d collected on his
most recent swing. That was her present. Everybody liked Tom,” he adds, laughing, “but he was a moocher, par excellence.”
Parker’s frugality is a well-known part of the Snowman’s legend, and it was a favorite part of his con. But what only Marie knew was that Parker, fearing another heart attack, was
terrified that he might die and leave Marie without means of support.
When the next heart attack did come, in 1956—Bitsy Mott claims it was brought on by an argument with Elvis, who “was getting a little belligerent and didn’t want to show up on
time”—it was mild, and Parker was merely confined to his Texas hotel room for several days.
In the future, Parker would use his heart condition as a form of manipulation, taking to his bed until Elvis capitulated and fell into line. Nonetheless, the underlying disease was real, and he
unsuccessfully tried to sell Elvis’s contract to both Oscar Davis and Connie B. Gay.
Parker’s brushes with mortality brought all the crushing depression that often attends heart attacks, and triggered a host of old anxieties, most prominently his abnormal fear of
death.
To a man like Andreas van Kuijk, with the dogma of the Catholic church still underpinning his conception of heaven and hell, the possibility of a third and fatal heart attack, coupled with the
events of long ago in Holland, may have weighed heavy on his mind. But whether from honest altruism, tax considerations, or the fear of eternal damnation, beginning in the Eddy Arnold years, when
he first became wealthy, Parker began making large contributions to charities, up to thirty-one separate organizations by the late ’60s.
“He was never free and easy when it came to giving away money to his employees, like a bonus at Christmas,” says Byron Raphael. And strangers who wrote in to the office with a
hard-luck story and a plea for help received only a terse “I am so sorry” and a picture of Elvis. But although he preferred to do things to help people that didn’t cost him
financially—cajoling RCA’s corporate office into donating appliances and television sets to philanthropic organizations and hospitals in his name, for example—at times, he dug
deep into his own pocket, especially where children, unwed mothers, or crusty old carnies were concerned.
When the King’s Daughters Day Home, which catered to low-income
families, needed a washer and dryer, Parker told its head, the Madison society matron Louise Draper,
to go pick out what she wanted. Later, he contributed a new kitchen to the center, a move that also benefited Marie, who had thrown off her carny past and attempted to reinvent herself as a
cultured member of both the International King’s Daughters and Sons, and the Riverside Garden Club.
While it’s true that Parker often shared the credit (“Elvis and the Colonel”) or insisted that his actions not be publicized (“I didn’t want people comin’
knockin’ on the door, you know”), he often expected a favor in return, even if the arrangement was only implied. He declared near the end of his life that through the years he donated
more than $500,000 to charities, two thirds of it to organizations in Tennessee, where high-powered lawyers and a succession of governors—including Frank G. Clement, who made Parker an
honorary Colonel in 1953, and Lieutenant Governor Frank Gorrell—picked small, deserving groups such as the Nashville Youth Orchestra, and dispersed the monies for him. Such connections, of
course, could be invaluable for a man who’d entered the country illegally and feared both discovery and deportation.
And there were other, more subtle connections. In the ’50s, when Father George Rohling became pastor at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, situated next to Parker’s home on Gallatin
Road, the Diskin sisters, who were members of the parish, asked the Colonel if he would consider contributing to the air-conditioning for the church school auditorium.
Decades later, Parker bragged that he’d put in the whole system, “$20,000 or $30,000 worth.” But the priest, now a monsignor, recalls that the church owed only $2,000 on the
units and that Parker generously gave him a check for the whole amount, and followed it up with a modest check each Christmas and a miniature pony to be raffled off at a fund-raiser. The Colonel
also gave Father Rohling “a small truckload of Elvis memorabilia,” which the priest admits he burned, thinking anything that had to do with the pelvis-thrusting entertainer might be
evil, a decision he now terms “a sad mistake.”
While Parker occasionally walked over for social events, he never attended mass at St. Joseph’s, nor did he ever accompany Marie to the Gallatin Road Baptist Church on Sundays. Andreas van
Kuijk may have spent most of his childhood in service to the Catholic saints, but the man who became Tom Parker did not want to hear any mention of the hereafter, with judgment and retribution for
earthly sins.
As Parker prepared to take Elvis to Hollywood in 1956 and began
spending more time in California, his personal contact with Father Rohling diminished, especially as the
priest moved on to another church in Nashville. Years later, they met again, when Marie died in 1986. Parker brought her back to Madison for entombment in the mausoleum at Spring Hill Cemetery,
where, not wishing to ponder the future, he bought only one crypt.
Madison was where Marie had become a lady, an accepted member of a sometimes snooty community. But now he was worried about her soul, and perhaps his own. Would Monsignor Rohling perform the
funeral, along with a Baptist minister?
“I thought it was rather unusual,” says the monsignor, since Marie had never been to St. Joseph’s, and, as he recalled, he’d never met her. He also thought it odd because
in thirty-three years, he and the Colonel had never spoken about religion, and Parker had never told the priest he was Catholic. But Father Rohling had already figured it out. One day, when he was
next door visiting the Diskins, he noticed something interesting. The Colonel, who never forgot who he was or where he came from—sending money to Holland for the flood relief in
1953—kept what the priest surmised was “pictures of family members” on his wall. The one that struck the father most was that of a nun, Parker’s older sister Marie.
J
OSEPH
Hazen was sitting in his Park Avenue apartment, reading, one Saturday night in 1956, when the
telephone rang. “Joe,” said his neighbor Harriet Ames, “look at this fellow on the television, Elvis Presley. He’s a terrific dancer. He’s quite a character.”
Hazen dialed his set to the Dorsey Brothers’
Stage Show,
and, as he remembered years later, immediately called Hal Wallis in California and told him to watch the program.
Some years before, Hazen, then a lawyer with Warner Bros. in New York, had met Wallis, a Warner production chief with a long list of solid commercial films, while on a routine trip to
California.
“We chatted,” said Hazen, a son-in-law of Walter Annenberg, the billionaire media mogul and philanthropist who would become the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain. In time, the two
worked out a 60–40 partnership to produce films independently, Wallis handling the artistic duties and Hazen the financial, with Paramount as their distributor.
The day after Presley’s appearance on
Stage Show,
Hazen telephoned the William Morris office in New York and spoke with Martin Jurow, an agent in the film department, about a
contract for Presley’s services. Wallis, clearly smitten with Elvis’s soulful stare (“There was something about his eyes, a solemn look . . . an expressive face, a new personality
that I knew was definitely star material for the screen”), went to work on Colonel Parker, who told Wallis that Elvis would “probably” be out on the West Coast soon and would
“consider” the possibility of a meeting.
“I knew instinctively that the Colonel was interested but playing it cool,” Wallis wrote in his autobiography. What he didn’t know was that Parker had set his cap for Wallis
back in his dogcatching days, when the Warner Bros. film crew came to Tampa to shoot
Air Force.
Through the years, Parker had obsessed about the producer, envying
his power and his wealth. He’d followed Wallis’s move to Paramount through the trade papers
and fantasized about a day when he would come to Hollywood with an act so big that a man like Wallis would be eating out of his hand.
And so he planned it from the beginning with Elvis, booking him into all of the Paramount-controlled theaters in Florida and up the East Coast, where the singer packed every one he played. The
word couldn’t help but get back to Paramount’s top brass.
But it was not just his desire to maximize his client’s talents, or to make him rich and famous beyond anyone’s boldest imagining. Through Hollywood, Parker, now forty-six years old,
would also make
himself
powerful—more omnipotent, even, than the old-line tycoons. His aim was not only to become a figure of respect, but also to build his own legend.
He would become, in effect, too big to be touched, able to forget that he was an illegal alien with no papers. In doing so, Parker would be in his total glory, conducting his professional
negotiations and personal manipulations with the outrageous, swashbuckling bravado of a pirate. At no other time would he ever be funnier, deadlier, or as obviously pathological in his business
dealings.
The prime target of his discontent was Hal Wallis. Eleven years - Parker’s senior, Wallis was the Hollywood stand-in for Parker’s own father and, in the Colonel’s mind, the
ultimate authority figure. To Parker, Wallis symbolized not just every wildly successful Hollywood mogul, but every Jewish son of immigrant parents who had “made it” in America. It
would not be enough for Parker to be accepted as an equal by such men. He would have to needle them, bully them, and prove his superiority with whatever means necessary, including chicanery,
deceit, and cunning.
When Wallis followed up to set a date for Elvis’s screen test, Parker did what only came naturally: he refused to take his calls. The producer, swearing later that “nothing would
stop me from signing this boy for films,” telephoned and telegraphed the Colonel to the point of exasperation. Hazen, who began to envision that part of his job might be to manage the man who
managed the star, likewise began a futile telephone campaign.