The Colonel (9 page)

While in many ways Andre’s association with the big “rubber cows” was reminiscent of his work in his father’s stables, he nonetheless found a great affinity with the
elephant. More than that, as Tom Parker he seemed to form some sort of primal bond with the creature. He would more quickly cry over the fate of a doomed elephant than he would over the end of a
human being.

“Colonel was very loyal to his friends, and he didn’t forget,” offers Sandra Polk Ross, his daughter-in-law in the 1970s. “His memory was as long as an
elephant’s.”

Predictably, the Colonel’s detractors would find less flattering comparisons: the elephant’s enormous bulk and compulsion for food; its thick hide, which makes it impervious to barbs
thrown its way; and especially its dangerous behavior when enraged.

“He was like a giant elephant standing on flat ground,” says Memphis attorney D. Beecher Smith II, estate and tax counsel to Elvis Presley near the end of the singer’s
life.

A 1993 made-for-television biopic carried the symbolism further, opening with a scene in which Parker demonstrates how to train an elephant by placing a rope around its neck when the animal is
young. As the elephant grows larger, it can easily break away, but without the intellect to overcome its early training, it remains a passive captive. The scene was meant to foreshadow
Parker’s command over Elvis, who could have broken
off his relationship with his manager at any time, yet remained under his control.

Whether Parker agreed with that characterization, during his days with Presley, he festooned his offices at the various movie studios with elephant memorabilia, from canes with elephant heads
worked into their knobby tops to stools disconcertingly made from an actual elephant leg—a big, stubby foot with huge, splayed toenails. “The place looked like a carnival midway,”
remembered Alan Fortas, a Presley entourage member.

From his first weeks in America, then, on this, his second and final trip, Andre the elephant handler had found his personal totem. But he had yet to reinvent himself in the full persona of Tom
Parker. For that, the young man with no education, no legal papers, and no real job prospects would need to slip away somewhere, to sequester himself where he could sharpen his language skills and
have some time to think. At the same time, he would need to draw a modicum of pay, enjoy free lodging, and receive his required three squares a day. On the eve of the Depression, the solution
seemed obvious. He would go for the security of his father’s early calling.

On June 20, 1929, Andre made his way to Fort McPherson, southwest of Atlanta, Georgia. There, the boy who had wanted nothing to do with military life, drill, or taking orders back home joined
the army.

Or so he would later claim. On May 18, 1982, in legal papers filed in answer to a lawsuit brought against him by RCA Records, Parker contended:

He later told the lawyers for the estate of Elvis Presley that he enlisted in the army while a minor, and reenlisted after he attained his majority.

Did Parker truly serve in the U.S. Army? There are several reasons to believe that he did. To begin with, he occasionally sent a brief note home with a photograph of
himself in what appeared to be an army fatigue uniform. Certainly he could have lied about his military service and, as the illusionist he was, merely posed in a borrowed uniform to fake the
images.

But that explanation seems too easy, especially in light of a second set of supporting evidence. From January 1930 through February 1932, Maria van Kuijk received monthly allotment checks sent
directly to her bank in Breda from a military finance office in either Washington, D.C., or New York. Because the death of her husband rendered Maria nearly helpless in some situations, Engelina
went to the bank to collect the money. The seventeen receipts she saved through the years from Frans Laurijssen, Bankier, in Breda, show that at first, Andre, who voluntarily had the money deducted
from his pay, sent home $5 each month, later increased to $7—a generous sum at the time.

Another reason to believe Andre served in the U.S. Army is that he regularly exchanged letters and photos with his old school friend Cees Frijters, who was then stationed on Java, in Indonesia,
with the Dutch army. Unlike the van Kuijk family, Cees had an army postal address for Andre, whom he still called Dries.

“I had ten or twelve pictures he sent me in those days,” Frijters said in the 1980s. “Dries was in the U.S. Army; he was in Hawaii.”

And from the photographs, the story checks out. In one, he wears tall army boots and a Smokey the Bear–style ranger hat, and appears to be in a rocky location, such as the foothills of the
Koolau Mountains. In another, he poses in front of an American army tent. In two others, he seems to be in a tropical area and wears a work uniform and tie that match the uniforms in archival
photographs of other army personnel stationed in the territory of Hawaii at that time.

Perhaps the most clinching of the photographs is one in which Andre stands next to a large number
6,
with the rest of the photo cut off, and another in which he appears smiling, sitting
in front of a wooden structure with his hand on a fire bucket. The bucket is the clue, for there, painted on the side is the code “A-64,” which would indicate that Dries was part of
Battery A of the 64th Coast Artillery Brigade Regiment, an antiaircraft unit stationed at Fort Shafter near Honolulu.

This, then, would seem to settle things. Except for one nagging problem: the name Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk does not show up in the mainframe records of the U.S. Army, nor do nearly twenty
variations and
spellings of that name. While a Captain Thomas Parker appears to have been a staff officer in the Coast Artillery stationed in Hawaii in 1930, the
forty-two-year-old captain was Thomas
R.
Parker, from Nebraska, who died in an accident at Fort Hood, Texas, in 1945.

Might the captain have been the man who interviewed the young Dutchman when he first arrived in Hawaii? Dirk Vellenga thinks he was. If so, Andre simply appropriated his name and changed the
R
of his middle name to
A,
for Andrew, the American version of Andre. But Thomas
A.
Parker, and even the more generic Thomas Parker fails to show up in several checks of
computerized army files and databases.

Complicating the mystery is the fact that Andre wrote to Cees saying that he was part of the Mountain Guard, and sent along a photo of himself with a hiking stick against a hilly background. But
Thomas M. Fairfull, chief of the U.S. Army Museum of Hawaii, which maintains an archive on the Hawaiian Coast Artillery, says that Hawaii had no Mountain Guard at any time in its history.

Just as strange is the fact that as the manager of Elvis Presley, Parker never reminisced about his army days. While he lined the walls of his offices with pictures of himself with movie stars
and carnival pals, he displayed no such photographs of himself from that era.

Even more perplexing is the fact that the music publisher Freddy Bienstock is certain Parker said he was in the U.S. Navy, not the army, and that Parker told his brother-in-law, Bitsy Mott, that
he was in the merchant marine: “He used to tell me some of the stories and the places he would go. You can name almost every country there is, and he hit the port.”

If Parker had been in the merchant marine, why would he have told the lawyers for RCA that he had served in the U.S. Army? And why would he have been so secretive about this period of his life
at all?

Perhaps Andre did not use his own name for two obvious reasons: his underage status and his illegal entry into the United States. And the reason he failed to ever become an American citizen is
as easily explained. A requirement of foreign nationals serving in the U.S. armed forces was a legal declaration of their intention to become a citizen. Such citizenship was not automatic, however,
and Andre never followed through with the official naturalization process, perhaps for a more unsavory reason.

By forfeiting his Dutch citizenship and by never becoming a naturalized American, Andre could argue, if pressed, that he was not subject to the laws of either country, especially any laws that
governed the extradition process. In fact, perhaps that is the very reason Andre enlisted in the
army—to
lose
his Dutch citizenship. That position might have
worked well for a man suspected of wrongdoing at home, especially of anything as heinous as the bludgeoning death of a greengrocer’s wife. And if such a thing did occur, it could certainly
explain why Andre suddenly changed his name in America, even in the U.S. Army, where foreign nationals served with regularity.

“Looking back from 1982, when he declared in legal proceedings that he wasn’t a citizen,” says Constant Meijers, a Dutch journalist who produced a documentary film about
Parker, “you would almost think that he had figured it out by 1932. Because he had already changed his name to Tom Parker. Why would he do that in the first place? Unless he understood that
one day when he had to deal with the law, it would come in handy if he were not naturalized.”

In 1973, a fire destroyed many of the U.S. Army files stored in the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri, the primary repository of individual military histories. But
ancillary records scattered in archives throughout the country show that during his interview at Fort McPherson, Andre claimed to be one Thomas Parker (no middle initial), and was issued the
service number of 6363948. He reported that he was both a sailor and an orphan (and hence got around the question of why the recipient of his allotment had a different name from his own), and he
volunteered to serve in the territory of Hawaii, then a little-known locale in a forgotten part of the world.

But if America was halfway around the globe and almost inaccessibly remote to a Dutchman of the 1920s, Hawaii must have seemed even more impossibly isolated. A recruit could choose a tour of
duty of either twenty-four or thirty-six months, and Andre opted for the longer stay, signing up for a three-year hitch. After thirty days aboard ship—departing from the Brooklyn Naval Yard,
traveling through the Panama Canal, stopping in San Francisco to replenish the boat, and then sailing the waters of the Pacific Ocean—he arrived at Honolulu, and finally at Fort De Russy in
the heart of Waikiki on October 19, 1929. There, among a boatload of others, he received a week of instruction before being transferred to Fort Shafter, three miles northwest of Honolulu at the
base of the Koolau Mountains.

As part of Battery A of the 64th Coast Artillery (AA) Regiment, Private Parker and his fellow recruits were expected with numbing repetition to man the three giant, sixty-inch searchlights in
defense against attack by sea.

“We didn’t have much to do,” remembers ninety-two-year-old Earl Kilgus, a Pennsylvanian who served along with Thomas Parker as one of the unit’s
forty-five privates. “It was mostly drilling, training, listening to speeches—what to do in emergencies or whatever. We wore our fatigues instead of our uniforms almost every day. But
you’re not talking about anybody working too hard.”

The initial months of Parker’s military service appeared to have a profound effect on his development. According to photographs, he was in the best physical shape of his life. While most
of his letters home perished during the German occupation of Holland during World War II, in one that survived, his handwriting and grammar had obviously improved, although he continued to write
without regard to a flow of information. The family remembers he was still signing his letters “Andre,” but often just “Tom Parker.”

As he ended his two years in Hawaii with a transfer back to the mainland in the fall of 1931, Andre seemed to be thinking more of home and informed the family of his change of post. He was now
part of Headquarters Battery of the 13th Coast Artillery, stationed at Fort Barrancas, just outside Pensacola, Florida, only fifty-five miles from where he had come ashore at Mobile. As proof, he
sent along a photo of himself in a Florida setting, dressed in the civilian attire of a baggy suit and bow tie. His sister Marie recalls that their mother sent him clothes occasionally, for which
she received a brief thank-you note after a long silence.

Sometime in the following months, Andre would say, he injured his right foot in an accident while on duty, and supporting records show that he, indeed, spent $1.50 at the post cobbler. Whether
his injury contributed to the painful gout he suffered in his later years, the immediate result, he told his brother Ad in 1961, was an early discharge from the service and a small pension for
life.

Yet Jerry Goodson of the Reno, Nevada, office of the Department of Veterans Affairs says there is no record of Andre van Kuijk or Thomas Parker ever collecting such a pension in any of the four
states—Florida, Tennessee, California, or Nevada—where he lived.

How is it that a man who routinely drove miles out of his way to promote a free meal in years to come failed to take advantage of a lifelong military pension?

In 1982, Colonel Tom Parker came as close as he ever would to offering up his secrets, when the Nevada federal court, in connection with the RCA Records suit, ordered him to submit to a
deposition on the issue of his claim as a stateless citizen. On October 25 of that year, lawyers
planned to question him concerning all of the events that caused him to leave
the Netherlands and take up residence in the United States. And, they wrote, “We should also be entitled to question him about his enlisting and re-enlisting in the United States Armed
Forces.”