The Colonel

by Alanna Nash

  But it was the big man standing behind him who caught her eye. He looked so much like her younger brother Jan. Then she saw his name—Tom Parker. Wasn’t that the same name scrawled at the bottom of those strange letters from the States some thirty years before?

  “My God,” the stunned Nel said aloud. “That is our Dries!”

  Afterward, Nel had telephoned her brother Ad. First Ad gazed at the face in disbelief, and then he compared it to old family photographs. Now Ad was certain that the famous Colonel Parker was their own long-lost brother.

  “It seemed like a fairy tale,” he said, but the rest of the family also saw the resemblance. Through the years, they had received the odd postcard, or an envelope containing a miniature American flag, a not so subtle statement of their brother’s loyalties. Now several of them began writing, mostly in their native language, which Parker could barely read anymore. They got only Elvis memorabilia in return.

  Finally, nineteen-year-old Ad Jr. decided to send a plaintive letter, an appeal to the Colonel’s heart. He could understand that Parker wasn’t interested in relatives he hadn’t seen in so many years, he wrote in English, but the family needed to know if at last they had found the brother they had mourned so long. “Are you,” he asked, “really my uncle?”

  On January 31, 1961, Parker sat down and answered “Master Ad Van Kuyk Jr.,” as he addressed the envelope, writing at once the most enigmatic and revealing document of his life. He typed it himself on plain paper, retaining all the odd syntax and spelling (“some-one”) that characterized his letters to Hal Wallis.

  The letter began in the third person, as if the author were a secretary. Throughout, in guarded self-protection, he showed himself to be deeply disturbed about an episode that he never quite defined. He repeatedly asked in a paranoid tone that all his relatives stop writing until they heard from “Mr. Parker,” as the letters were getting mixed in with the fan club mail, and “I am sure you will agree that this matter if it involves Mr. Parker must be handled very carefully and privately.”

  As for why the family had not heard from him, he assured Ad Jr. that “Mr. Parker has felt the same longing and hopes as all of you but must have had a very good reason and many problems so not to bring them to any of his people at any-time.” Then he cryptically referred to “Friends” who might assist them in the future. “We will try to help in some way to at least make-up for any mistakes some-one may have made without meaning to do so.”

  With that, he bizarrely switched to first person (“Remember me to all of them”) as the text hinted of past deeds and secrets. He signed the letter with a signature that only his Dutch family would know—“Andre.”

  Ad Jr. was proud to have received such a reply but was baffled by its contents. What was Uncle Andre really trying to say, referring to “mistakes some-one may have made without meaning to do so?”

  The letter, sent by air and marked “Special Delivery”—useless in Holland, but still communicating a red code of urgency—arrived in Breda on February 4, 1961. Sixteen days later, in a surprise turnabout, Ad Sr. was invited to visit his brother in America. The trip, which Parker paid for, was arranged through a Dutch husband and wife with a similar surname—van Kuijck—living in Hackensack, New Jersey.

  Ad Sr. flew to New York on April 9. There he was met by the van Kuijcks, who entertained him for eleven days until the Colonel returned to Los Angeles from the location filming of Blue Hawaii. Then the three traveled to California.

  Parker, suspicious that his visitor “was a crook from Europe to blackmail him,” as Ad Jr. says, asked the man outright if he had come for money. Ad Sr. assured him he had not. Parker stared at his sibling, only four years younger, and then said finally, “Yes, you are my brother.”

  They spent a week together, with Parker putting him up at his apartment in Los Angeles, conning a William Morris trainee into showing him the sights, even introducing him to a few colleagues as a “business associate.” Still, the Colonel kept his distance. He showed no emotion when Ad Sr. told him news of his brothers and sisters.

  Ad Sr. had promised the family that he would bring back pictures of himself with their brother, but although Marie obliged, Parker refused to be photographed with him, as if such evidence might somehow be used against him.

  Yet it was important that the family understand just how successful he had become. Before Ad went home, Parker did the unthinkable—he took him to Elvis’s rented home on Perugia Way and introduced him as his brother. Elvis, watching television with the guys, rose to shake his hand. The Colonel doubtless had a story for why his brother spoke in a thick foreign accent, though according to Ad Jr., Elvis was neither impressed nor especially curious. Lamar Fike believes Presley never understood the connection. “If Elvis had known, he would have said it. He couldn’t keep a secret.”

  When Ad Sr. returned to Holland, the family was eager for news. What was he like? How had he explained his awful absence? Ad Sr. had few answers for them. They hadn’t talked much about private matters, he said, other than how Andre had painted sparrows yellow and sold them for canaries, and gypped rube carnival goers with a quarter glued to the side of his ring. Ad Sr. had the distinct impression he shouldn’t ask too many questions. But he did meet Elvis Presley, the singer their brother had made the most famous man on earth.

  In the following months, Ad Sr. wrote his own story for Rosita, and in 1967, as the owner of a drugstore where the jukebox played only Elvis records, he gave an interview to Dineke Dekkers for the Dutch fan club magazine It’s Elvis Time. Ad Sr. died in 1992 of emphysema, never fully elaborating on the events to his siblings.

  “The family connections in Holland were not close at all,” says Ad Jr. “To me and my mother, he told a little more.” But Ad Jr., a language teacher living in the Dutch village of Oostburg, keeps it to himself.

  15

  TROUBLE IN THE KINGDOM: THE COLONEL TIGHTENS HIS GRIP

  IN March 1963, Parker worried about the arrival of a different kind of visitor, though there was nothing in her demeanor to indicate that she would become a pivotal figure in anyone’s life, let alone the Colonel’s. Petite, pretty, empty-headed except for the usual teenage obsessions, and positively gooney-eyed with love, sixteen-year-old Priscilla Ann Beaulieu had captured Elvis’s heart in Germany, and now she was moving to Memphis.

  The stepdaughter of an American air force captain newly stationed near Friedberg, Priscilla had bragged to a girlfriend back in Texas that she was “going over there to meet Elvis.” She achieved her goal in a week and a half. Lamar Fike remembers that she showed up at the house that first night wearing a blue-and-white sailor suit and white socks. “I said, ‘God Almighty, Elvis, she’s cute as she can be, but she’s fourteen years old. We’ll end up in prison for life.’ I watched that from the very beginning with abject fear.”

  Parker had long known about her, both from his spies among the entourage, who reported Elvis’s every move, and from stories in the press. Life magazine had photographed Priscilla at the Rhine-Main air base as she waved Elvis good-bye, captioning their picture “The Girl He Left Behind.” Elvis denied that he was smitten (“Not any special one,” he told reporters when they asked if he’d “left any hearts” in Europe), but an elaboration (“There was a little girl that I was seeing quite often over there . . .”) and a telltale grin said otherwise. It was she he’d spent his last night with in Germany, and he hadn’t stopped thinking about her, instructing her to write to him on pink stationery so her letters would stand out in the avalanche of mail. On several occasions, he’d brought her to the States to visit.

  Now, Elvis had persuaded Captain Beaulieu to let Priscilla come to Memphis and attend Immaculate Conception High School, where, he told him, the girls wore uniforms and studied under the tutelage of stern-faced nuns. The implication was that Elvis would marry Priscilla when she was old enough, but “he didn’t give them a time,” she remembered later. “He just said, ‘I want her here.’ ”

  The immediate prom
ise was that a chaperoned Priscilla would live on nearby Hermitage Road with Vernon and his new wife, Dee. That arrangement lasted only a matter of weeks, Priscilla slipping back and forth between the houses. With Grandma Minnie Mae Presley serving as lenient watchdog, the teenager soon took up residence at Graceland, sharing Elvis’s bed—though chastely, she maintains—and learning the drug protocol that allowed her to participate in his night-for-day world.

  During Presley’s army years, Parker had steadfastly refused to allow Elvis’s most serious girlfriend, Anita Wood, to travel to Germany to see him. (“We had to keep everything so quiet . . . the Colonel said it would hurt his career.”) But though the Colonel took an unusual liking to Priscilla, he was furious at such a Lolita-like setup. Elvis was now twenty-eight years old, with twelve years’ difference in their ages. Not so long before, in a redneck hormone storm, the piano-pounding Jerry Lee Lewis had ruined his career by marrying his underage cousin. This situation wasn’t nearly as dangerous, but if discovered, it would still be a scandal, and Presley’s movie contracts had morals clauses in them—a fact, along with paternity suits, that was never far from Parker’s mind.

  If Elvis insisted on living with Priscilla for any length of time, the Colonel saw, they needed to marry, and Parker told him so. A marriage might calm Elvis down, especially in Hollywood, where the starlets lined up to be admitted to his parties.

  After first joining Elvis in California, where he was making Fun in Acapulco for Paramount, Priscilla was relegated to Memphis, where she waited impatiently for him to return between pictures. Priscilla was not alone in noticing that his behavior, fueled by a steady stream of uppers, downers, and sleeping pills, was becoming frighteningly erratic. In fact, one night Elvis’s temper was so raw he threw a pool cue at a female party guest who had insulted him, injuring her shoulder and collarbone. He was sorry—he broke down and cried and said he hadn’t known what had come over him, except he felt increasingly boxed in by the lightweight movies he derisively termed “travelogues” for their quasi-exotic locales. He was doing three and, soon, four a year, rubbed thinner with every picture, and suffering nosebleeds on the set from anxiety.

  Fun in Acapulco, Elvis’s fifth film since Blue Hawaii, was a perfect example of the kind of empty fare that continued to satisfy his fans, if not the actor himself, and is memorable only for a quavering, if coincidental connection to the life of Andreas van Kuijk. In it, Elvis plays an ex–circus performer, an aerialist, who in a moment of fright and misjudgment, allows his brother to fall to his death. Traumatized, he flees the circus world to escape his past and assume a new life in a foreign country.

  The film, which at one point has Elvis’s character, Mike Windgren, sending a telegram to his hometown of Tampa, Florida, was directed by Richard Thorpe (Jailhouse Rock), who again explores the theme of a young man jeopardizing his future through the tragedy of accidental death. As in his earlier film, Thorpe includes the character of a talent manager—a pint-sized Mexican shoe-shine boy (“Are you sure you’re not a forty-year-old midget?” Elvis asks)—who takes 50 percent of his - client’s money, insisting he’s not an agent, but a partner. Since Elvis was unable to travel to Mexico, the studio relied on a variety of process shots, mostly background projection, to place him south of the border.

  By now, in keeping with the Colonel’s cross-promotional synergy, RCA culled most of Elvis’s singles from the largely dreadful soundtracks. Since 1961, he’d enjoyed a chart-topper with “Good Luck Charm,” and watched a pair of hits, “Can’t Help Falling in Love” and “Return to Sender,” climb to number two. Yet no Elvis release was a sure bet anymore—some singles failed to crawl out of the thirties—and Parker put the pressure on Bill Bullock in RCA’s New York office to make things happen. “I may not type good,” Parker joked, a comment on his two-fingered keyboard style, “but they sure do know what I mean up there.”

  Indeed, they did. A memo went around at RCA with the instructions “always remain friendly with the Colonel,” a directive that struck fear in the hearts of those who remembered how he’d gotten one executive fired over an altercation regarding Brother Dave Gardner, whom Parker had brought to the label. Now, if Presley wanted his records mixed one way—with his voice as part of the instrumentation—and Parker wanted Elvis more out front, it was Parker the label obeyed.

  In early ’62, he worked out a new arrangement with RCA concerning previously released material. The agreement provided both Elvis and the Colonel with substantial new revenue from special side deals, which Parker would later refer to as joint ventures. They would split those monies 50–50.

  The contract, which Parker insisted be no longer than one page and contain no legalese, would be renegotiated seven months later. It was changed so often, said one employee, that “RCA has nothing to say about anything Elvis does or anything we do for him.” Though the label’s lawyers insisted the company back out of promoting a forty-three-city tour in late ’62—an artistic disappointment for Elvis and a financial loss of more than $1 million—Parker was regarded as the absolute power.

  Consequently, the staff went into a frenzy if he happened to drop by unannounced. Joan Deary, Sholes’s secretary, worked out a signal with someone downstairs so she could get the office in order before she met him at the elevator, when Parker would “just explode out into the hall.” The first time it happened, she rushed to put out an autographed picture the Colonel had sent her boss for Christmas. “None of us liked it,” she remembered, “and we’d put it in a drawer behind the door to Steve’s office. I went flying in there to pull it out, and I banged into Steve, who was also trying to get the picture out of the cabinet and on display.” Bill Bullock was only half kidding when he sent Parker a large office clock inscribed, “Colonel, it’s whatever time you want it to be.”

  Unlike the men at RCA, ever-present for Parker like dutiful sheep, publicist Anne Fulchino was the only one to contest the Colonel. Concerned about Elvis’s morale and the erratic chart placement of his records, she asked Tom Diskin to take her to see Presley on the Paramount lot one day in early ’63. “That kid was not only unhappy, he was ashamed for me to see him prostituting himself with those crummy pictures,” she remembers. She sat down with him and explained her campaign for promoting his records, “practically drawing him a diagram on how you build a star.”

  Elvis realized he needed to make major changes in the direction of his music and his movies, and promised Fulchino he would do so. But though she believed Elvis “knew Parker was not the right manager for him—the way the Colonel wanted him to go was not the way Elvis wanted to go”—he allowed himself to be hamstrung with unsuitable projects.

  On the set of Kissin’ Cousins, filmed only months after his talk with Fulchino, Elvis told costar Yvonne Craig that he figured the Colonel would know when the time was right to return him to dramatic pictures. Was Elvis merely saving face? The Colonel’s dominance was so strong that Presley may have thought he was incapable of standing up to him, even to demand stronger scripts after Parker turned down his one request to approve them. (“If they’re smart enough to pay you all that money, they’re smart enough to write a good script.”) But Elvis’s reticence—his lack of emotional backbone—proved to be his fatal flaw.

  Adam van Kuijk with three of his children, from left Ad, Jan, and Johanna, about 1922. He would die three years later, at the age of fifty-nine. (Courtesy of Maria Dons-Maas)

  The van Kuijk family lived in the stable of the van Gend & Loos building, seen here to the right of the music hall, marked “Kon. Erk. Harmonie De Unie.” (The collection of Dirk Vellenga)

  Anna van den Enden was murdered in the living quarters behind this shop at Nieuwe Boschstraat 31, in May 1929. (Tony Wulffraat)

  Andreas van Kuijk, aka Tom Parker, circa 1926–7, likely during his Chautauqua days on his first trip to America. (Elvis Presley Enterprises. Used by permission)

  The well-dressed young gentleman, age nineteen, in the year he disappeared from his native Holland. (The
collection of Dirk Vellenga)

  Private Thomas Parker (seventh from left, middle row) in the 64th Coast Artillery Brigade Regiment, stationed at Fort Shafter near Honolulu, probably fall 1929. Fellow soldier Earl Kilgus stands behind him, back row, fifth from left. (Courtesy of Earl Kilgus and Robert H. Egolf III)

  Cees Frijters received this picture of Andre as an American soldier, stationed at Fort Shafter. (The collection of Dirk Vellenga)

  A photo Andre sent home to his family, probably in 1932, when he was stationed at Fort Barrancas, near Pensacola, Florida, in the 13th Coast Artillery. (The author’s collection/source unknown)

  Private Thomas Parker’s army discharge record, which identified him as a psychopath. (The author’s collection)

  Not long out of Walter Reed Army Hospital, working a movie event, most likely in Tampa, 1935. (The author’s collection/source unknown)

  Late 1930s: Looking every inch the carnival press agent, though front offices jobs would always be denied him. (The author’s collection/source unknown)

  Parker, as a Humane Society field agent, during filming of Air Force at Tampa’s Drew Field, 1942. (Tampa Tribune)

  When Hollywood came to Tampa in 1943 for A Guy Named Joe, Parker (back row, with ice cream) invited the camera crew on a picnic at a friend’s house. Bobby Ross sits at Parker’s right with his girlfriend and future wife, Marian DeDyne. Marie appears front row left. (Courtesy Sandra Polk Ross and Robert Kenneth Ross)