The Colonel (2 page)

For all of the twenty years that Parker outlasted his greatest discovery, he would also have to live with the allegations that he had destroyed him, stifling his artistry in third-rate Hollywood
formula pictures, suffocating
his ambition in 837 Vegas performances from 1969 to 1976, and killing his will to live by refusing to challenge him in meaningful ways—a
European tour, a dramatic film role to reclaim his self-respect, a crack at a memorable song.

Whether regarded as a meretricious and evil confidence man, or as a brilliant marketer and strategist, as remarkable as the star he managed, no figure in all of entertainment is more
controversial, colorful, or larger than life than Tom Parker. “He was so immense, so gigantic in his way,” remembers writer Robert Kotlowitz, an RCA publicist in the late ’50s and
early ’60s. “His style was equivalent to a great politician’s, with so much flamboyance and wit and, underneath it all, cunning. He had to beat the whole world.”

Yet at his death, Parker was blasted by rock critic Dave Marsh as “the most overrated person in the history of show business,” and assessed by Dutch journalist and filmmaker Constant
Meijers as “a nobody who needed a somebody to be anybody.” To this day, a favorite debate question among pop music journalists is whether Elvis, whom the Colonel often referred to in
carnival terms as “my attraction,” would have remained a regional act without Parker’s guidance, or if the young performer was such a blazing comet that no one could have stopped
his streak across the sky.

The probability is that neither man would have been as big in his field without the other, Parker realizing, like P. T. Barnum, that the promotion of a curiosity was just as important as the
curiosity itself. A chameleon who was many things to many people, Parker has his staunch defenders—as a visionary, a businessman, and a friend, even by those who got up from the losing side
of the bargaining table. And while Parker probably would have referred to himself as a promoter more than anything else, having marketed the icon most recognizable in all the world after Coca-Cola,
Chet Atkins, who dealt with many of the biggest artists during his tenure as an RCA Records executive, pronounced Parker “the best manager I ever saw. . . . Whatever he cost Elvis, he was
worth it, because Elvis would’ve . . . lost that luster in no time if it hadn’t been for the Colonel.”

Mike Crowley, who traveled with Parker in the concert years of the ’70s and is now a talent manager himself, speaks, like many, of Parker’s loyalty, and also justifies his treatment
of Elvis, the addict. “Nobody killed Elvis except Elvis, and nobody could have helped Elvis but Elvis. The only other thing he could have done was walk away.”

Parker himself never bothered to address his critics, nor did he try to carve out much middle ground in the debate of whether he was the devil or angel in Elvis’s own
private hell. When pressed about his handling or mishandling of Elvis, he’d merely bristle, stamp his cane into the ground, and repeat his stock answer: “I sleep good at
night.”

Beyond that, the old Dutchman who understood America far better than most Americans simply threw out the line he’d used for decades to keep himself out of headlines (“Elvis is my
only client and my life, so I never give out stories about myself”), allegedly because he was writing a memoir to be called
How Much Does It Cost If It’s Free?
But it was an
excuse he had concocted to keep others from looking too closely at the hocus-pocus of his life, and from having to explain himself, especially in light of a 1980 lawsuit in which the state of
Tennessee accused him of “overreaching” in his fiduciary responsibilities to Presley.

If Elvis was unknowable by his manager’s design, the Colonel was beyond knowing, even to his own family. In 1980, Parker’s brother-in-law, Bitsy Mott, who spent many years on the
road in the Colonel’s employ, was asked to explain the man he’d known for nearly half a century. “That man’s a mystery,” he said, and little more, for not even he knew
that Parker had a secret to protect, a secret that colored nearly everything he did.

On the surface, it would appear only that Parker had entered the country illegally and had never become a naturalized U.S. citizen. But if something darker had happened in the distant
Netherlands, it must have been deep, shameful, and nearly unforgivable, at least to Parker himself. Certainly he never talked about it, or about his Dutch upbringing, to either Presley or any of
his previous clients. And when the Colonel’s stepson, Bobby Ross, died in 1978, it was without benefit of the knowledge that the man who had reared him from the age of ten had not been born
as Thomas Andrew Parker in Huntington, West Virginia, as he always claimed, but as Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk—known as Andre to his Dutch biological family.

I first met Colonel Parker in December 1992, and I wondered then how the secret of his origins—revealed to the world at large in 1981—impacted the all-dominating decisions he made in
shaping nearly every event in the life and career of Elvis Presley.

At first glance, Presley and Parker appeared to have little in common except the raging fire of ambition, shaped by a shameless ferocity both struggled to keep hidden. Yet I discovered as I
began to research this
book that in the strange choreography of chance and coincidence, the fates of Elvis Aaron Presley and Thomas Andrew Parker were bound by two still
surging events, and the pull each incident had on both of them.

Despite the hundreds of books profiling Presley and his career, the story of the relationship between these men, I saw, had yet to be uncovered. Parker was a man of not just one, but many
secrets, and the keeper of several fantastic tales he fought to preserve, with Elvis almost always paying too much of the price.

On each of my three visits with Colonel Parker, I sat across the table from him and looked into his eyes—hypnotic pools of unearthly blue—and wondered, Just who
are
you?

And so I decided to research the story chronologically, trying to find the boy who became the man. That mission took me to Holland, where I met with the kindest and most cooperative sources on
this book: Parker’s Dutch family, who were as mystified by his behavior and as dedicated to finding the truth as I was.

Over a period of three years, I interviewed and corresponded with several members of the van Kuijk clan, including the Colonel’s ninety-two-year-old sister, Marie. And with the help of
American journalist Bill Burk, I established an ongoing and treasured friendship with Parker’s niece, Mieke Dons-Maas, who worked so hard in the 1990s to try to reunite her mother, Engelina,
with her brother in America. Along with her husband, Ted, and friends Angelo Somers and Hanneke Neutkens, who spent years gathering materials for a proposed Parker foundation, we united as a team,
chasing the apparition of a lad who had walked the Breda streets so long ago on the first leg of his remarkable journey.

In the end, my research led me to realize that the tale of Colonel Thomas Andrew Parker, né Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk, is, beneath the veil of secrecy, a tragedy, and very nearly the
stuff of Shakespeare.

The following is my attempt to resolve the conundrum of his life.

—Alanna Nash

T
O
a first-time visitor, the town of Breda, Holland, is a picture postcard of European charm and character.
The prettiest metropolis in Noord-Brabant, Holland’s largest province, which stretches from Zeeland, a large Delta area opening on the North Sea, to within three miles of the German border,
Breda was originally built as a strategic fortress at the convergence of the Mark and the Aa Rivers. The town now boasts all the ultramodern facilities as a commercial and industrial center, but
the remnants of the wall that surrounded the city at the beginning of the fourteenth century, the glassy canals that run all through the town, and the old, ornate architectural façades serve
as reminders of its past.

Today, the van Gend en Loos building at Veemarktstraat 66, for example, houses an upscale menswear shop, Joep Krusemeyer Herenmode. In the late 1980s, the structure was targeted for demolition,
but saved because of its historic significance. Having survived some three hundred years, the building remains one of the six oldest in Breda. It was here that the man who would later call himself
Colonel Tom Parker was born.

Like so much of Breda, the row-house neighborhood is a mix of old and new. Five shops down from the former van Gend en Loos building, at Veemarktstraat 52/54, there’s the Spronk
Muziekhandel, a record shop whose window front features a sticker with a likeness of Elvis Presley and the dates 1977–1997, a reference to the twentieth anniversary of the - singer’s
death.

Little has actually changed here for centuries. On the Grote Markt, the the cobblestone square that serves as the vibrant focus of life in this easygoing town of some 130,000, the handsome old
buildings that have housed everything from hay markets to municipal offices since Breda was granted its city charter in 1252 are still in use, as is the Grote Kerk, the
impressive Gothic church with its openwork gables, crocket spires, and a baroque onion-shaped dome ornamenting its tower.

The church, which took 125 years to build and dominates the town, has stood above the Grote Markt since the thirteenth century, a silent witness to Breda’s succession of feudal rulers from
1250, its Spanish conquest in 1591 and 1625, and its French domination from 1793 to 1813. Not far away, atop the Kasteelplein, where Catholics once tortured the Protestants and then burned them at
the stake, looms the Kasteel, Breda’s citadel, built in 1536. Today, it houses the Koninklijke Militaire Academie, or Royal Military Academy.

The military tradition of Breda, an army city where the Royal Dutch Indian Army, or Koninklijk Nederlands-Indies Leger, established their headquarters—and where, as a soldier, René
Descartes first became interested in math—has long been a strong and honorable source of pride. And so, in 1887, when Adam van Kuijk was drafted into the Dutch army as a private in the 3rd
Regiment of the Field Artillery, and stationed at the Seelig Barracks in Breda, the twenty-one-year-old was joining a noble and historic tradition.

The son of a working man—probably a fisherman—named Andreas van Kuijk, who hailed from Enkhuizen, about forty miles north of Amsterdam, Adam, born May 7, 1866, had grown up in the
village of Raamsdonksveer, twelve miles north of Breda.

This particular branch of the van Kuijks (or van Kuyks) could perhaps trace their ancestors back to the Middle Ages, when they were a wealthy, aristocratic, ruling-class family, for more than a
hundred years (from 1295 to 1428), governing the small town of Hoogstraten.

Later, when the region split in two, the southern part was assimilated into Belgium. The van Kuijks could not sustain their rule in the new political geography, and fled fifteen miles due north
to the town of Breda. Their ancestors forever claimed to be related to the lords of Hoogstraten, and never forgot their sense of loss, or their sense of entitlement—no matter how tenuous it
might have been.

Adam van Kuijk had joined the army for a twelve-year term. His artillery unit relied upon horse-drawn gun carriages, and Adam found he had a natural affinity for tending horses. When he was
discharged in 1899, he stayed in Breda and took a job as livery man for the freight and package handling firm van Gend en Loos, the UPS of Holland. Although he had just spent a dozen years in army
attire, Adam was happy to don the heavy, dark, double-breasted van Gend en Loos uniform, with its shiny brass buttons and regulation cap.

Van Gend en Loos had established their offices at 66 Veemarkstraat, a prestigious main thoroughfare in town. The company used the rear of the building to stable its ten
draft horses and offered an apartment above the stables for the livery man and family.

As it happened, Adam van Kuijk did, indeed, have a family on the way. The mustachioed army man was not especially comely. He wore a perpetually stern, if not sour expression, his cheeks sunk in,
his dark eyes seemed drilled in his head, and he carried the gene for the van Kuijk ear (the left one stuck out almost at a right angle), which he was destined to pass on to his first two children.
His personality—rigid, disciplined, and unyielding—was also not the type to turn the head of the opposite sex, nor was his stiff, humorless voice. But while still in the service, he had
begun dating Maria Elisabeth Ponsie, a woman ten years his junior. The youngest of eight children, she was also from Raamdonksveer, born September 2, 1876, the daughter of freewheeling
merchants.

Whether the couple got caught up in the Christmas spirit, or in ringing in the twentieth century, sometime in December 1899, Maria conceived a child. Adam and Maria were Catholic, as were most
people in southern Holland, and allowing few outlets beyond the pale of the church, their Catholicism was far more strict than the Catholicism practiced in America. With the attending guilt and
sense of propriety, especially as Maria was beginning to show by springtime, the couple married on May 10, 1900. Their son, Josephus Andreas Johannes, also called Joseph, or Sjef, was born four
months after the wedding, on September 19.

By the time of Sjef’s birth, Adam and Maria had taken up residence in the
bovenhuis,
or living quarters above the stables, and as part of the marriage agreement, her parents,
Johannes and Maria Reinenberg Ponsie, had moved in with them. The accommodations were snug: the area had a living room and a great room—the newlyweds slept in one, and the Ponsies in the
other—with a loft that would double as the children’s bedroom.

Maria’s parents, Johannes and Maria, could not have been more different from Adam van Kuijk, except for their shared Catholicism. The Ponsies were
parlevinkers,
floating peddlers
who traveled Holland’s intricate river and canal system, selling and trading household goods from their barge to other travelers on the water.