The story of Elvis Presley stays fascinating because even when you think you know it, you still don’t know it. No matter how much factual material you have, it never quite explains how he could squander his talent so, particularly when he returned from the war.
Two volumes of biography by Peter Guralnick still don’t entirely explain what happened, and that mystery makes Elvis endlessly intriguing. It’s appropriate then that his manager, Col. Tom Parker, is an equally mysterious figure. He is the designated black hat in the Elvis story, but little beyond that is actually known about him including his real name. James L. Dickerson’s Colonel Tom Parker: The Curious Life of Elvis Presley’s Eccentric Manager (Cooper Square Press) examines the life of Parker, or as much of it as is known, and while it isn’t wholly dependable as biography, it is a fun addition to the canon of Elvis writing.
Parker appeared abruptly in Tampa, Florida in the early 1930s; before that, there is no record of his existence. Like a balding Athena exploding fully formed from the forehead of P.T. Barnum, he emerged in Florida’s carnival/sideshow culture complete with a name, though not a title (That would come later courtesy of Louisiana governor Jimmie Davis). In 1982, he told a probate court that his real name was Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk and that he was born in Holland, but this revelation comes late in the book. By that time, Parker has been shown to be untrustworthy so often that there’s no reason for readers to give those utterances more credibility than anything else he said.
The story Dickerson tells is largely the one people assume to be true, that of a hustler who continually made short-sighted decisions trading real long term wealth for short term cash. Dickerson shows him to be as uninterested in aesthetic issues as people assume him to be, but this is one of the millstones that can’t be fairly hung on Parker because few managers at that time thought about much besides selling records and seats. What Dickerson adds though, is motivation. According to the book, Parker had a bad gambling problem, and the money he lost to mobsters at the gaming tables in Las Vegas prompted him in 1967 to inform Elvis that his management fee was jumping from an already high 25% to a staggering 50%. Standard fees at that time were around 15%, but Dickerson suggests that Parker raised his fee because he gambled away his share of Elvis and rather than lose the revenue Elvis represented, he just got another percentage.
Dickerson, however, does note that “There was no witness to the conversation when the Colonel informed him of the change, and no letters were exchanged or clarifying documents drawn up.” Throughout the book, there are a lot of assertions that are undocumented, and because he was an old carny, Parker led a life that can’t easily be documented. What he said wasn’t always what he meant, and many deals were recorded by handshakes at best, which poses a problem for a biographer. A lot of what Dickerson says isn’t reliable the way readers expect biographies to be reliable, but on the other hand, the blanks in Parker’s life and documentation leave room for some very provocative assertions.
The proposition that much of what Parker did was influenced by his gambling debts to the mob is entertaining and could well be true. In 1973, he sold Presley’s master tapes and royalties to RCA, Presley’s label, for a price that was unconscionable for anyone thinking about Presley’s financial future. That too wasn’t wholly unusual since some managers understood where the real money was in the music industry, but many didn’t, and few ever expected popular music to be the goldmine it turned out to be. Nonetheless, Dickerson quotes one source as saying the buyout “certainly fit in with his need to come up with money because there are certain people to whom you cannot owe money.” Dickerson’s most extreme charge toward Parker is that he actually worked to get Elvis inducted into the army to prevent Presley from earning money Parker had already gambled away.
How Elvis responded to the Colonel’s deals isn’t a part of Dickerson’s book, nor is it dealt with in any detail in Guralnick’s books, but the relationship between Parker and Presley has always been one of the many mysteries that keeps his story alive. There was a huge international demand for Presley, but Parker never accepted any overseas gigs because, according to Dickerson, he was aware of his own illegal immigrant status and didn’t want to deal with any inconvenient complications, particularly when there was still money to be made in America. Elvis knew Parker was limiting him financially and as an artist, but he remained more or less loyal to Parker until the end.
Colonel Tom Parker is, in short, one more book on the Elvis pile. Parker may have been as malign as Dickerson suggests, but Presley-basher Albert Goldman attributed the deals to RCA to the more basic need to meet the growing payroll at a time when Elvis was playing fewer and fewer concerts. The Presley story, which Parker is a part of, points to the limits of knowledge and facts; at this point no one will ever really know the story, but even if either of the two were still around to explain it all, we’d still never fully understand any more than we do now.
FOOTNOTES
Jerusalem Calling by Mark Schalit is a Jewish Marxist punk’s examination of America’s place in the political and cultural world of the “post-everything” era. The book is exactly what you’d hope it would be—provocative, considered and unpredictable. Schalit’s skill is the way he merges the political and the personal, so feels the effects of policies and he sees and he is not excused from practices he was a part of. Of particular interest to this column is a chapter on the growth of the independent music labels and their sad tendency to emulate the major labels they viewed as the enemy.
Forever Young is a collection of essays by Francis Davis, many of which first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly and The New York Times. The book is at its best when Davis addresses the theme of aging and music in essays like his reappraisal of Burt Bacharach and Bob Dylan. Too often though, it is simply a collection of jazz articles albeit about interesting figures like Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra. Many are good, some are very good but none are essential.
