A New Book Casts Elvis and the Colonel in a New Light

The story of Elvis Presley is the story of America in the last half of the 20th century, so explosively improbable that we can still barely make sense of it a quarter of the way through the 21st. You can assign Elvis either blame or credit for opening the ears of white listeners to Black American music, but there’s no question that he busted the doors wide open. As Americans, we are who we are because of that—mixed up, messed up, occasionally at one another’s throats—but essentially in search of accord through the salvation of a chord. The story of Elvis’ rise and fall hasn’t faded from the public imagination, proving irresistible to filmmakers like Sofia Coppola and Baz Luhrmann. If anything, in an era when algorithms seek to determine our taste—and, increasingly, AI seeks to feed that taste—both Elvis’ gifts and his downfall remind us that human fallibility, with all the suffering and joy it enwraps, is the only place from which true greatness can emerge.

Yet history also tells us that Elvis had help. Not even Elvis would have been Elvis without Colonel Tom Parker, a Dutch-born mover-and-shaker who felt lightning strike when he first saw this outrageously charismatic—but green—kid onstage in 1955. Legend, fostered at least partly by the idea that cynicism is cooler than earnest enthusiasm, has led us to believe that when Parker looked at Elvis, he saw only dollar signs. But there’s more to both men than that, and there’s probably only one person alive who could tease out the complicated truth: with The Colonel and the King: Tom Parker, Elvis Presley, and the Partnership that Rocked the World, veteran pop-music scholar Peter Guralnick, Elvis’ most ardent and compassionate biographer, makes the case that Parker was hardly the monster he’s commonly been made out to be. Sure, Parker loved making money, probably even more than he loved actual money. But he also loved Elvis, with a mixed-up love that was opportunistic and tender in equal measure. Their ambitions meshed; both were almost mystically persuasive, and stubborn too. They rose together and, though Colonel outlived the man he always called “my boy” by 20 years, they fell apart together. Guralnick’s view of Parker is both clear-eyed and sympathetic, but best of all, it’s persuasive. You come away thinking differently about a person you thought you’d already nailed down. And isn’t that what a biographer is for?

Guralnick met and began a shaky almost-friendship with Parker in 1988. He was just embarking on his magnificent and definitive two-volume Elvis biography, Last Train to Memphis (1994) and Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley (1998), and the two men corresponded sporadically until 1996. (Parker died in 1997). After the publication of Last Train to Memphis, Guralnick was invited by Jack Soden, the CEO of Elvis Presley Enterprises, to examine the portion of the Elvis Presley archives containing every aspect of Parker’s business dealings, Elvis-related and otherwise, from gas receipts to court documents to contracts. Guralnick also gained access to Parker’s letters, a trove of playful, enthusiastic, forceful, fancifully punctuated missives that trace the contours of Parker’s rise, in tandem with that of Elvis. The first section of Guralnick’s book tells the story of Parker’s life, with a healthy dose of skepticism about all the things Parker may—or may not have—made up. The second section contains the letters, with notes from Guralnick appended. You might call the book’s second half repetitive—it repeats some of the lore covered in the first. But it’s probably more accurate to call it a reinforcement. Seeing Parker’s way of doing business, spelled out in his own words, bolsters everything Guralnick has already told us about him. It’s all part of the book’s power, which dispels some myths and revels in the glory of others. That’s the only way to honor the spirit of the brilliant, elusive Parker.

If you’ve seen Luhrmann’s passionate and hugely entertaining 2022 movie Elvis, you may feel you know part of Parker’s story, but not necessarily the truth of it. The first section of Guralnick’s book begins by explaining, in detail, how Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk, born in Breda, Holland, in 1909, reinvented himself as Colonel Tom Parker—not really a colonel, but a mythmaker extraordinaire. Young Andreas didn’t fit in at school. His father, a livery man, didn’t understand him, and apparently abused him. Andreas found ways to escape, at first just emotionally. As a kid, he loved the circus so much he put together one of his own, where he performed acrobatics and enlisted a small collection of sparrows and trained beetles, as well as a rabbit, as additional attractions. When he tried to make his father’s workhorses part of the act, his father beat him. Yet Andreas seemed to possess the gift of charming himself out of bad situations, earning people’s trust and friendship nearly everywhere he went. In the spring of 1926, he came to America as a stowaway, only to be caught out and returned. He stowed away a second time, successfully, a few months later, on a ship bound for Hoboken. Barely 17 years old, he not only began a new American life, but launched a full-scale self-reinvention.

Parker enlisted in the U.S. military in 1929, acknowledging his Dutch birth, and was stationed in Hawaii, a place he would come to love. But the orderly life of the army wasn’t for him. He peeled off and became a carnival manager, learning the business from the bottom up, eventually segueing into artist management. He shepherded the early careers of country crooner Eddy Arnold and Canadian-born singer-songwriter Hank Snow. But when he saw a hotshot newcomer perform at the Louisiana Hayride in 1955, he was a goner. Guralnick writes, plainly, “It was astounding the speed with which it happened.” If Parker had already begun distancing himself from his Dutch past, in a flash he’d practically erased it. He shuffled off his other commitments. The young Elvis Presley became his past, present, and future.

From here, Guralnick builds a convincing case that as shrewd a dealmaker as Parker was, he never acted in a way that failed to serve his client’s best interest. The deals he made were mutually beneficial for sure; the more Elvis made, the more he made. But Parker assiduously avoided getting involved in Elvis’ artistic or personal choices. He intervened only when he saw his client engage in self-destructive behavior: after Elvis made a crude joke onstage at an early show, Parker took him aside to admonish him, and Elvis, a good boy at heart, listened. In later years, he tried to intercede through Presley’s father, Vernon, to stem Elvis’ outrageous overspending, knowing his client couldn’t make back the money he was pouring out—or paying out, especially to the numerous hangers-on who’d begun to attach themselves like barnacles.

Did Colonel—though the article “the” is often appended to his title, Parker had adopted “Colonel” alone as his official name—push Elvis so hard, particularly in signing him up for a series of demanding but lucrative Las Vegas shows, that he drove his client, friend, and surrogate son further into self-destructive drug use? It’s debatable how much of that Parker could control. Regardless, Guralnick makes the case that Elvis’ decline caused Parker an almost unbearable amount of pain. In writing this book, Guralnick earned the trust of Parker’s second wife and widow, Loanne, who fills in some heartrending details. After a disastrous show in Hartford, Conn., in 1976, Parker had tried and failed to talk to Elvis backstage; the star had been “too groggy to respond,” he told Loanne immediately afterward. “What can I do?” he said to her. “The real Elvis…is sharp and clever, but the person I saw tonight didn’t even recognize me. No one knows how much I miss the real Elvis. If only I knew how to bring him back. I miss my friend so much.” Guralnick continues recounting what Loanne told him: “And then he started crying—he seemed unable to control himself, as the tears came pouring down.”

That wasn’t Colonel’s everyday style. He was evasive, charming, eccentric, and wily. He was also tireless. When he bought Elvis out from the man who’d discovered him, Sun Record Company’s Sam Phillips, he drove a diamond-hard bargain. But if he hadn’t done it, the Elvis we know—the only Elvis we can imagine—wouldn’t have existed. And what kind of world would that be?

Parker had his own demons: he was a compulsive gambler, which endangered his few close personal relationships. And though members of his family in Holland tried to reconnect with him over the years, he rebuffed their every effort—those people belonged to an old identity he’d long ago shed. But mostly, he was fiercely loyal to his friends and colleagues. Though he began his relationship with Loanne before his first wife, Marie, had died, he made sure Marie was well-taken care of through her long periods of illness. Beneath his flair for flimflammery there was a core of integrity, even if, like all human beings, he wavered here and there.