The Colonel

by Alanna Nash

  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.”

  “I teased him about it a couple of times,” remembers Bill Willard. “I saw him at breakfast over at Leo’s Celebrity Deli and I said, ‘How’s the book coming along?’ And he grumbled and grumped and turned away. [Loanne] looked at me and just shook her head.”

  By then, most of Parker’s oldest friends were dead or dying, unable to confirm or deny the Colonel’s mythology. When he wasn’t in the casino or working for Barron Hilton, he said, he spent his time reading. “I’ve got plenty to do . . . I think a lot . . . People take up exercise, you know, but I exercise my brain.”

  To do so, he wrote doggerel poetry and sent it to friends such as Jerry Weintraub. And even though he still got up at five A.M., he watched Elvis’s movies on late-night TV. But he was more entranced by the television evangelists, particularly Pat Robertson, who built a $20-million studio with viewers’ contributions, Parker told one visitor, a gleam in his eye. And he never quit dreaming up promotions, entering into a business deal with Vegas entrepreneur Hank Cartwright to sell back-to-the-’50s memorabilia via catalogue.

  Mostly, he stayed on the telephone and dictated letters to Loanne, who wondered why there were no Colonel fan clubs in Europe, considering the amount of overseas mail he received.

  “He just got lost after Elvis died,” says June Carter Cash, whom Parker represented in the early ’50s. “He would send me little notes saying he was still thinking about me and still loved me—anything to make him feel like he was close to the old days and to the things that really started it all.”

  While he took great pride in boasting how many old pals like Gene Autry and others kept in touch (“Eddy [Arnold] calls me probably at least once a month”), the truth was that he often did the calling, greeting familiar voices with his usual “kid, how you doin’?” He particularly made comforting calls to the sick, phoning the cancer-riddled Alan Fortas every Sunday, and keeping in daily contact with British fan club president Todd Slaughter after Slaughter’s heart transplant in 1994.

  “He was a lonely old man who came over from a foreign country alone and terrified,” says a friend of thirty years, “and he didn’t know how to accept somebody who loved him for just being the Colonel. But he wanted to be loved more than anybody I ever knew.”

  Others saw it, too. Elvis’s piano player, Tony Brown, thought Parker had mellowed in old age, finding him surprisingly “very nice” when the two met again in the Colonel’s last years. To some extent, it seemed to be true. Though he never forgave Byron Raphael for leaving the fold and largely cast him out “like a king would banish you from the court,” as one observer notes, he made up with a number of people he had cast aside—the still-infatuated Trude Forsher, for example—or whose feathers he had ruffled, including Julian Aberbach and Lamar Fike. “We hadn’t spoken in probably ten years,” says Fike. “He said, ‘Do you still love me?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I still love you. How could I not, for crying out loud? You’re part of my life.’ He acted like nothing ever happened.”

  But he never lost his paranoia. When psychologist-author Peter Whitmer contacted him for an interview for his book The Inner Elvis: A Psychological Biography of Elvis Aaron Presley, Parker felt so threatened he telephoned Joe Esposito and Henri Lewin, the retired president of the Hilton, and “warned them about what to say.” And after the publication of Elvis Meets the Beatles, author Chris Hutchins was shocked to get an irate phone call, Parker “shouting very loudly” because Hutchins had written about the Colonel’s secret shrine. “It wasn’t like a manager lecturing an errant journalist. It was more like a father telling off his son—he was quite a bitter old boy.”

  The real problem, says Lamar Fike, is that Parker expected to die by age seventy and never thought he’d outlast his enemies. And if living to old age was his punishment, Parker began wearing every day of it on his face and on his body. His eyes still snapped, but his skin—so thin it seemed translucent—was speckled with liver spots, the backs of his hands mottled to an almost solid brown. His flesh hung in crepelike folds at his neck; his eyes sank into bottomless blue wells. Plagued by congestive heart disease and a recurring bronchitis that often slipped into pneumonia, he looked not old, but ancient. His arthritis was so painful that he sometimes canceled engagements, and it took all his strength to hoist his weight off a chair. But, he insisted, “I’m healthy up in my mind.”

  For the most part, he pretended all was well, keeping secret his hospital stays and appointments with several cardiologists. If people asked why he’d given up his beloved cigars, he claimed they cost too much and never mentioned his persistent cough or difficulty breathing. When he insisted on going to Los Angeles to take the children of one of his favorite vendors to the circus, he faltered, out of breath and ghostly pale, on the walk to the top of the arena.

  He made his last two major public appearances in 1994. In March, he returned to Palm Springs for the ceremony to unveil three stars in the sidewalk at the corner of Palm Canyon Drive and Tahquitz Canyon Way—one for Elvis, one for Rick Nelson, and the last for Parker, an honor arranged by the Colonel’s former protégé and Nelson’s manager, Greg McDonald. That June, the Hilton threw a sumptuous bash for his eighty-fifth birthday, and Priscilla Presley, among others, flew in from Los Angeles.

  Only a month before, Parker had spoken brazenly of Lisa Marie’s marriage to Michael Jackson, spewing disdainfully that Elvis would not have approved. And he had taken other jabs at the estate, insisting he had never “exploited Elvis as much as he’s being exploited today.” Yet at the party, all seemed well. Jack Soden testified to his help and suggestions in running Graceland since it opened to the public, and Priscilla dutifully hugged and kissed the Colonel and Loanne. “I’m still working for you, Elvis,” an emotional Parker said, wiping his eyes and pointing a finger skyward. He’d arrived in a golf cart, not wishing to use his wheelchair. Everyone knew this was the last of the big birthdays.

  Throughout 1995, his health continued to deteriorate. When his old friend Gabe Tucker saw him the following year, “he knew he was dyin’. He never said nothin’ about it, but he didn’t want us to go. God, he was in bad shape. I seen him breakin’ fast.” By September 1996, he was essentially housebound. But still potent and quick with advice. He entertained a few visitors such as Jimmie Dale Gilmore, the Texas singer managed by Parker acolyte Mike Crowley. Gilmore was enchanted: “He said Elvis was as hard a worker as he ever knew, and it looked like tears were coming to his eyes.” Anyone who demonized the Colonel, Gilmore said, “will never convince me.”

  Such visits buoyed him. “In the last years,” Freddy Bienstock offers, “he had hardly any business. People had shunned him, or he shunned them. He would tell me I was the closest friend he had.” The two last spoke in November 1996. “I was supposed to go out that fall, and I told him I couldn’t make it, but I’d definitely be there in February. And he said, ‘I’ll be here. I’m not going anywhere.’ ”

  But by December, the Colonel could barely speak. When friends called, Loanne had to talk for him and relay messages back and forth. Still, at eighty-seven, he clung to his entrepreneurial dreams. In one of his last visits with Jerry Wei
ntraub, they schemed about putting their own relationship on film.

  “He was my mentor, my teacher, my father figure,” says Weintraub. “He told me he loved me, and I said, ‘I love you, too,’ and I kissed him, and he kissed me. I’m glad we had that moment.”

  On Monday afternoon, January 20, 1997, Parker was at home in his living room, perusing a pile of Christmas cards and letters. Loanne, in another room, suddenly heard a thud. She called out to no answer, and found him slumped in his chair. The Colonel had suffered a stroke.

  At Valley Hospital, Loanne got on the phone and called her husband’s circle. Bruce Banke, Parker’s loyal contact at the Hilton, arrived to find the Colonel still in the emergency room. Banke leaned over and took his hand. “Colonel, it’s Bruce.” The old man opened his eyes, squeezed his friend’s finger, and then faded. “I was the last person he saw,” Banke says. “He never regained consciousness.” The following morning, just before ten, he died. Loanne arranged for his cremation, though the final resting place of his ashes—not in Palm Cemetery, as reported—would become as mysterious as the rest of his peculiar life. His death certificate would list his birthplace as Holland but his citizenship as American.

  Four days later, the invitation-only guests who filtered into the service at the Hilton were a predictable lot, a few famous faces—Eddy Arnold, Sam Phillips—mixed in with hotel honchos, record company execs, highbrow carnies, and swarthy men in dark, monied suits. Elvis-ographers large and small paid their respects, as did Phyllis McGuire, once Sam Giancana’s girlfriend. Ron Jacobs, the radio personality Parker had befriended in Hawaii so long ago, draped a fresh maile lei around a giant picture of the Colonel.

  Almost no one noticed Tom Diskin, who after leaving Parker’s employ upon Elvis’s death, had finally made a life for himself, marrying a French Elvis fan and producing a daughter. Scrimping through the years, he had nonetheless invested his stock and bonuses wisely, buying a luxurious California mansion before moving back to Nashville. He would die the following year in a traffic accident, leaving a multimillion-dollar estate, much of it in property and land.