The Colonel (61 page)

Suddenly, the estate began spinning a revisionist take on the Presley-Parker past and planning an Elvis and the Colonel Museum. The two men “shared an abiding friendship that is often
overlooked and misunderstood by the press and the general public,” as Soden later put it.

That stance put Soden and company in an awkward position when author Chet Flippo came down hard on the Colonel in the introduction to an estate-sanctioned book,
Graceland: The Living Legacy
of Elvis Presley.
No one at Elvis Presley Enterprises read Flippo’s manuscript before it
went to press, and Priscilla unsuccessfully put pressure on the publisher
to pull the volume from distribution.

“As I recall,” says Flippo, “Parker read the book, blew up, and called Priscilla, who . . . demanded to have [it] killed.” The work was immediately removed from the
Graceland gift shops, and the estate soon set up the Colonel Parker Tribute Committee to issue a thirty-two-page magazine,
Elvis & Colonel Tom Parker: The Partnership Behind the
Legend.

Like the estate, Barron Hilton was publicly loyal to the end. In June 1989, the hotel staged a gala dinner for the Colonel’s eightieth birthday, with former Tennessee lieutenant governor
Frank Gorrell, who had long handled Parker’s charitable contributions, as master of ceremonies. Celebrities winged in on the Hilton’s tab, RCA executives hovered and fawned, and scores
of others, including President George Bush, Bob Hope, and Bill Cosby sent cheery telegrams of congratulations. “They window-dressed it pretty nicely,” says Joe Delaney, the
Las
Vegas Sun
columnist. “The Colonel held court.”

Two months earlier, the Colonel and Loanne (“a single man and a single woman,” as the deed read) jointly bought a town house in the Spanish Oaks area, an old, upgraded neighborhood.
While $300,000 homes were not uncommon in the gated community, the residence was modest by comparison. They lived simply, shopping at Von’s grocery at Decatur and Sahara, where Parker often
waited outside on a bench and talked to passersby while Loanne did the marketing. She bought his clothes off the rack at JC Penney.

By all accounts, Loanne was good for him. She hung on his every word, laughed at his stories, and bragged on him to others, seeking not so much respect for herself, but for him. More important,
she served as an indispensable nurse, doling out his daily medications, watching his cholesterol and his diet to stave off the gout that swelled his extremities, and driving him to Elias
Ghanem’s medical clinic for the slightest ailment, even as Parker’s loyalty to the doctor who gave his client so many drugs seemed to some perverse.

They made an odd couple—she tall and angular, towering over him; he, squat and shorter than anyone remembered, balancing his bulky body on a bamboo cane and leaning heavily on her arm in
his increasingly unsteady walk. She was also his most vigilant watchdog. When Merilyn Potters, a reporter for the
Sun,
visited the house for an upbeat story to mark Parker’s
birthday, she found the couple guarded, insisting
on conducting the interview in the front courtyard instead of in their home. “He wouldn’t answer certain
questions regarding Elvis,” Potters remembers. “And often, when he began to ramble, [Loanne] put the lid on.” Her usual technique: Glancing over and raising an index finger to
halt him if she thought he revealed too much.

“I think the Colonel was sharp enough to realize that he needed a guardian,” offers Joe Delaney. “Loanne was a completely faithful servant.”

And so, at the urging of Mae Axton, Parker married Loanne at the home of lawyer John O’Reilly on October 26, 1990. The Colonel was then eighty-one; Loanne, who took on the unofficial title
of Mrs. Colonel, fifty-five.

A month after the ceremony, Parker signed a will that established a trust for talented youngsters, left monetary gifts to friends, and provided for his new wife. What few people knew was that in
relative terms, the Colonel was no longer a wealthy man.

While he remained a loyal contributor to the
Sun
camp fund for needy children, donating $14,000 in the last six years of his life (“buying his soul out of hell,” charged one
wag), he largely lived off U.S. Treasury bonds, which he’d let mature and roll over. Occasionally, he put in appearances at fund-raisers around town (including one for presidential candidate
Bill Clinton, whose mother, Virginia Kelley, became a gambling buddy), but the invitations were gratis, and Loanne kept her eye on every penny. Though he still sent cash to treasured acolytes at
Christmas, twice in coming years Parker would add codicils to his will to reduce or rescind his financial gifts.

“Loanne hoarded money to keep him from pissing it away at the tables,” as Jackie Kahane recalled. While the Colonel gambled, she sat quietly, reading a book.

Privately Loanne told people Parker was often cold to her, but in public their interaction was playful and childlike. “He said, ‘Without her, I - wouldn’t be living,’
” remembers a friend. “And when she’d try to give him his pills, they would just fuss, but that was part of the game. They were like two little kittens. She added those extra
years to his life.”

In the early ’90s, the Colonel suffered what some said was his second stroke. Milder than the first, it was still an ominous sign, given the correlation between strokes and heart disease,
the twin harbingers of the death that was beginning to take the lives of so many of his family members in Holland. Josephus, the eldest boy, had died in 1984, and then Adriana,
the eldest girl, succumbed in 1989, eight years after she had written her estranged brother in America, begging to hear word of him. Her letter had been hand-carried by the
Colonel’s onetime compatriot, Lamar Fike, who, working with the Dutch reporter Dirk Vellenga, helped Albert Goldman uncover Parker’s European past.

“When his sister walked into that room in Breda, I almost had a heart attack—she looked like a twin of Tom Parker. It was like finding out your daddy wasn’t who he said he
was.” The Colonel just stared at Fike when he put the letter in his hand and “didn’t make a comment either way.” Adriana received no reply.

Now Engelina was ill with cancer and wanted to tell her brother goodbye. In November 1989, her daughter, Mieke Dons-Maas, introduced herself to Bill Burk, the American publisher of
Elvis
World
magazine, at a meeting of the Dutch Elvis Presley fan club. She asked his help. Burk directed her to the Las Vegas Hilton, and for months, she faxed Parker letters and left phone
messages, but all went unanswered.

Finally, Burk gave her Parker’s private number. Mieke got Loanne on the line and explained she was the Colonel’s niece. In halting English, she told her of her mother’s last
request, and of how the other family members loved their brother Dries and cried at the mention of his name. Loanne listened patiently, went to deliver the message, and returned with one curt
sentence: “The Colonel said he doesn’t wish to speak with anyone from Holland.”

The family remains mystified as to why Parker refused contact. “I suppose he just wanted to cut those ties and any information about Holland muddied the history he had created for
himself,” says Mieke.

Unless, that is, his fate had become entwined with that of Anna van den Enden sixty years before. If so, a second tragedy for Parker, his family, and his famous client may have been the
Colonel’s ignorance of the fact that he was never named in the police report for the murdered woman. Under Dutch law, the longest any suspect would have been wanted for questioning was thirty
years, and then only if he had been sought or accused. After 1959, whoever knew the ultimate truth about the death of Anna van den Enden was a free man, able to travel the world without
restrictions.

Loanne insists Parker was proud of being a Dutchman, and “spoke with great love and affection about his country. He never forgot his roots.” Certainly they were often on his mind. He
made his charitable contributions on his birthday, a European custom. And in casual conversation,
he told acquaintances that he and Loanne had adopted a son, poignantly
producing a picture of a large, clubfooted rag doll. Its name: Andre.

Still, he remained diffident about all old-world contacts. When a young Dutch couple, Angelo Somers and Hanneke Neutkens, sent him a $100 box of cigars with a letter explaining their wishes to
establish a Colonel Tom Parker Foundation in Breda, he returned their carefully decorated gift unopened. Dutch newsmen fared no better. Constant Meijers tracked him down at a slot machine in the
Hilton casino and explained his plans to make a documentary film about Parker’s integral role in the history of rock music. The man who’d once threatened to have a publicist’s job
because she had not included him in photographs now wanted nothing to do with the media in his native country.

“He talked a little bit of Dutch to me, and then he held on to the coins with one hand, and he waved me away with the other, saying, ‘You’re from Holland? Thank you, no,
bye-bye. I know about Holland, I’ve been there.’ ”

Freelance videographer Jorrit van der Kooi had a similar experience, approaching Parker at the slots on his birthday. Van der Kooi spoke to him in Dutch, and after a brief exchange about
Parker’s heritage, delivered the news that Ad van Kuijk, the brother who had visited Parker in the States, had died. The Dutch journalist was rebuffed in his attempt to snag an interview, but
captured chilling footage of his angry subject. As van der Kooi’s camera whirred on, the Colonel, wearing dark cotton gloves to keep the handle from sullying his hands, continually poured
what was left of his fortune into the eager slots, his face contorted with rage.

Though his stroke had left him weak, he still went out for lunch every day, and then on to the Hilton—nothing kept him from the twilight world of the Las Vegas casinos, where the ringing
of the slot machines sounded like so many old-time carnival bells, and the croupiers called out like pitchmen. Loanne helped him into a wheelchair and pushed him through the crowds to the
high-roller section.

“He continued to gamble until the day he died,” remembers Nick Naff. “But it’s awful hard to play roulette from a wheelchair, so he would sit and have two or three people
pull the slot machines for him.” Usually, he insisted on feeding the machines himself—sometimes four at once—but often he was so feeble or stiff that he dropped the tokens,
attendants scrambling to pick them up for him as they skittered across the floor.

When the occasion called for it, however, he could rally, as he did at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Elvis Presley commemorative postage stamp at the Hilton in January
1993.

Inside Edition
reporter Craig Rivera covered the event, mostly to corner Parker for comments on
Elvis and the Colonel: The Untold Story,
a made-for-TV movie set to air later
that month, starring Beau Bridges in a dismally unflattering portrait of the man who made the King.

Parker denied he was upset by the portrayal (“Now, when they’ve done all they could with [Elvis], they’re pickin’ on me a little”), but found himself in his
toughest interview yet. He denied trading Elvis’s services for gambling debts (“My gambling has never had anything to do with Elvis”), and laid the blame on Presley for never
playing overseas (“I had a whole staff that could go to Europe with him. He didn’t want to go, because he didn’t want to play outdoors, and if you don’t play outdoors, you
can’t make it”).

Finally, Rivera skewered him on the 50 percent commission, which Parker still defended as a partnership arrangement. “I know of four or five big stars that have a deal like that. But my
deal was not fifty percent of the profit. My deal was fifty percent of work I created where he did not have to perform . . . On the motion pictures, the hotel, and the music business, twenty-five
percent. Never no more. I sleep very good at night. And Elvis and I were friends.”

The Colonel would be uncharacteristically sentimental about his client in latter years, telling reporters, “Every once in a while I sit by myself in my old rocking chair and talk to myself
about Elvis . . . Some of the best deals we made were when we argued together [because] we came up with a better solution . . . It’s hard to convince people how close you can be to
someone.”

And with reason. When Chris Hutchins visited Parker at home in 1993 for a book he was writing on Elvis and the Beatles, he was surprised to find the Colonel’s “secret shrine”
to Presley, made up of letters, telegrams, and photographs. Yet he found Parker as emotionally hard-shelled as ever.

“Do you miss him?” Hutchins asked. “Frankly no” came the reply. “There’s no point missing what you haven’t got.” The reporter gazed at the vast
collection of gold records lining Parker’s hallway. “Which of these records do you play the most?” he inquired. “None of them,” Parker said. “The only records I
keep are business records. That’s what
he paid me for.” In fact, the manager was fond of relating, he never took the time to listen to Elvis’s last three
albums or watch his final movies.

But down deep, Hutchins probed, wasn’t Elvis the son the Colonel never had? The bulbous body leaned forward. “I have to be honest,” Parker answered. “I can’t say
yes to that one either. I never looked on him as a son, but he was the success I always wanted.”

Normally, Parker told interviewers, he was saving his Elvis stories for his autobiography, which he planned to call
How Much Does It Cost If - It’s Free?
His would be only a
favorable account. “I’ve turned down more books for big money . . . a $2-million advance . . . because my story, they will not print. They said, ‘No, we want the dirt.’ I
said, ‘Well, I’m not a dirt farmer.’ ”

Parker had been claiming the autobiography was under way since 1957, of course, leading one journalist to muse that the book “seemed designed more to intimidate a number of lifelong
business acquaintances than to herald a switch to the world of letters.” The Colonel waved off such critics. “I got the book right up here,” he would say, tapping his forehead.
“I don’t know if a guy should put out a book too soon if he’s still alive . . . if I were to expire before completing it, Mrs. Parker here has all the information to finish
it.” But as late as 1994, he privately admitted he had yet to write the first word. “He freezes,” Loanne said, “when I take out a tape recorder.”