True Story

What Elvis Gets Right—And Wrong—About the Real Colonel Tom Parker

His accent wasn’t so theatrical, and he was way funnier than Baz Luhrmann gives him credit for. But according to Alanna Nash—who spent time with the real Colonel in the ’90s—there were times when he was just as scary as what you see onscreen.
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© Warner Bros/Everett Collection.

In 1963, Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis Presley’s audacious manager who had gotten his start selling candy apples in carnivals, read in the paper that Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidential yacht, the U.S.S. Potomac, was going to be salvaged. Some called it his “Floating White House.” But Parker, who was born in Holland in 1909 as Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk and never became an American citizen, didn’t care about that. He saw the Potomac as just another snow job, as he called his art of the con. He would donate the rusting hulk to charity and put a P.R. feather in the cap of his only client: Elvis Presley.

On February 14, 1964, five days after the Beatles made their debut on The Ed Sullivan Show, Elvis sat at a press conference with the Colonel on the pier at Long Beach, California. With them was actor Danny Thomas, there on behalf of St. Jude, the Memphis research hospital Thomas had founded to help find cures for catastrophic childhood diseases. He graciously accepted the “piece of shit,” as Thomas is said to have called the boat, to sell for cash. As the press cameras clicked away, and the freshly painted Potomac gleamed in the background, the Colonel chuckled to himself. Elvis had paid $55,000 for the thing, but the Colonel, snowman to the core, apparently had only had one side of the old yacht painted—the side that faced the dock. The other remained in its dilapidated state. Why bother to paint both sides? Just present the side you want to show.

In his frenetic, dazzling, exhilarating mess of a movie, Elvis, Baz Luhrmann has done much the same when it comes to Colonel Parker, showing us only one side of a highly complex and intensely fascinating and mysterious character. As someone who knew Colonel Parker and had three, tense, three-hour meetings with him over a two-year span in the ’90s, I admit there were times I felt a chill of evil from him that scared the hell out of me and made me fear for my personal safety, especially during a ride through the Vegas desert. But Luhrmann’s Colonel is straight out of Faust, dripping with the evil of Mephistopheles.

Aside from arguably being the father of American popular culture through the marketing and merchandising of his client, the Colonel negotiated one of the first $1 million-a-picture deals for a Hollywood actor, landed Elvis the highest-paying Vegas contract for the time, and protected the exploitation rights for dead celebrities through his swift actions for the Presley estate in 1977. He also staged the first live international solo concert via satellite with Elvis’s Aloha from Hawaii special in 1973. But in Luhrmann’s treatment, he’s Satan in a snowman sweater. And the bombastic director, as vulgar in his own way as Parker was in his, pays him little respect for his significant business acumen.

Tom Hanks plays this villainy broadly with cartoonish gusto, veering somewhere between Snidely Whiplash and Sydney Greenstreet. Though Austin Butler is a little too pretty as Elvis, and can’t replicate the hypnotic pull of Presley’s exotic good looks, he’s nonetheless a convincing prince from another planet. Hanks, on the other hand, never disappears into the role of Parker. He’s always Tom Hanks, cladded up in a fat suit, prosthetic jowls, and an exaggerated nose drooping from a boiled egg of a face and pate, sometimes resembling his pal LBJ.

Here’s more about what the movie gets right and wrong.

The Colonel’s Real Accent

Hanks gives Parker a pan-European-cum-Nazi accent, but in real life, most people bought his story of hailing from Huntington, West Virginia, a relatively isolated area in the ’50s. His accent, on display in a rare interview with Ted Koppel in the ’80s, sounded more like a slight speech impediment mixed with the insulation of a rural upbringing. He had trouble with the consonants R, which sometimes came out as an L (“Mr. Plesley”), and with J, which he could pronounce as a Y (“you yust missed him”), as evident in the phone call he had with Canadian DJ Red Robinson. What threatened to give away his Dutch heritage was the word “book,” which he delivered with three O’s, rhyming with “fluke.”

Near the end of the film, Elvis learns that Parker is not an American, and doesn’t have a passport, which means Elvis will never fulfill his dream of playing in Europe. That never happened—Elvis died not knowing of Parker’s illegal status—but he would have had to have had a tin ear not to pick up on an accent as obvious as Hanks’s.

The Colonel Was Slyly Funny, but Not Ridiculous

The Colonel had a highly developed sense of humor that enthralled members of Elvis’s entourage as well as actor Hugh O’Brian, whose Wyatt Earp tour Parker promoted in 1957. O’Brian told me that when he asked Parker why he insisted on doing business in cash, the Colonel said, “Because, boy, there ain’t nothin’ like cash! If there was, God would’a named it cash.” He was also fond of saying, “Spend it now—you don’t see any hearses with luggage racks on them.”

But in Luhrmann’s film, Hanks plays it hammy and over the top. It works when he issues a rejoinder to Hank Snow, who objects to Elvis’s wiggling, but his funniest line is almost lost in the hustle and bustle of the filming of Elvis’s ’68 comeback special, sponsored by the Singer sewing machine company. Walking down the hall, the Colonel hits up the Singer rep for a free machine for Priscilla: “Mrs. Presley is quite a homemaker, Priscilla is, and I’m sure she would love to have one of the machines so she could knit Elvis [a sweater].”

Elsewhere in this section of the film, Parker—who in real life had sold the network on the idea of a Christmas special so he could turn Elvis into a late-’60s Bing Crosby—appears as a bumbling rube in his insistence that Elvis sing “Here Comes Santa Claus.” It’s funny, but renders Parker ridiculous. Sure, he was out of touch with the times by then, and didn’t see the Phoenix-like potential of what the special could do for his “attraction,” as he called Elvis. But he was never inept, and he was fiercely loyal in his business dealings and determined to honor his contracts to the letter.

The Colonel Goes to Nightmare Alley

In the scenes in which he promotes Hank Snow, Parker talks about staging a carny wedding at an upcoming stop. Parker routinely did this during his days with the carnivals. Remembered Alan Fortas, a member of Elvis’s “Memphis Mafia” entourage: “He performed a wedding ceremony on a Ferris wheel. They had the bride and groom in one car, and the bridesmaids in the next one.” He so identified with that lifestyle that he sought the company of concessionaires, midway operators, and sideshow performers long after his carnival days were over.

While managing Elvis and traveling the country in the late ’50s, the Colonel was accompanied by William Morris agent-in-training Byron Raphael, who remembered, “He often took me to these little carnivals that were so small they didn’t even have a big tent…. In California, between Barstow and Bakersfield, there were billboards every hundred yards, ‘See the Thing! Half Man, Half Animal!’ He took that really seriously. We’d stop and go in there, and it would be very dark, very eerie, and ‘the Thing’ would be this poor pathetic Black person on his hands and knees in a low cage. He had a tail on him, and long hair, and when he would growl, it was really frightening.”

If that grim scenario sounds familiar, the Colonel was also a huge fan of Nightmare Alley, the 1947 drama recently remade by Guillermo del Toro. “The fascination Colonel had with that picture was unbelievable,” Raphael remembered. “He sat there so engrossed that he never moved, though God knows how many times he’d seen it. He talked about it all the time, for years.”

The Colonel Loved Elvis’s Racy Headlines—In Fact He Helped Stage Them

The film has it wrong: Parker likely didn’t blanch when Elvis’s hips summoned the vice squad. The Colonel encouraged anything that grabbed headlines and created controversy for his boy. On October 30, 1957, the day after the second of two Elvis shows at the Pan-Pacific Auditorium, Variety ran the headline, “L.A. Police Order Presley ‘Clean Up’ His Pan-Pac Show.” Hollywood publicist Gene Schwam recently revealed to Variety the story behind the headline: told that the second show wasn’t moving tickets, Schwam, taking a suggestion from Parker, called the police and said he’d heard that Elvis “was getting too risqué for the kids.” Then he told the press what the police said. The second show sold out.

For what it’s worth, the film has it right when Elvis gets suggestive with a plaster Nipper, the RCA dog, in concert. But it’s said to have happened at the Pan-Pacific show.

He Only Took Credit for Elvis’s Success, Not Blame for His Demise

Several times throughout the film, Parker as narrator, says that “you,” meaning the people who loved Elvis, were at the heart of Elvis’s fatal problems. In other words, his loyal subjects killed the king. And it’s true that Parker never seems to have taken any blame. The time he got so mad at me, hammering his cane in the floorboard of his Buick on that ominous ride through the Sin City desert, was when I asked him why he didn’t give Elvis better movie scripts and songs.

“Elvis picked all his own songs and pictures—the scripts were sent directly to his house. The only song I suggested was ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’ I got Elvis the most money ever for an entertainer in Las Vegas. People forget that! Nobody! Nobody got more money in the history of Las Vegas!”

The author with the real Colonel Tom Parker, in 1992.

By Judy F. May. 

Luhrmann’s Parker is an uncaring man, though the character protests that he’s not. The real Colonel Parker didn’t seem to regard Elvis as a son, even though he apparently cried when Elvis forgot his birthday. Rather, he admitted, “I have to be honest. He was the success I always wanted.”

The last time I saw the Colonel, who peppered his office with stuffed animals—prizes from the carnival—we were back in the Buick, and he and his wife, Loanne, were driving me to my hotel after lunch. It was quiet in the car, and then he spoke.

“We’ve adopted a son, you know.”

I played along. “Oh, yes? A four-footed one?”

“I should say not. Loanne, where’s that picture?”

Loanne dug in her purse and produced a torn picture of a rag street vendor doll, posed with a teddy bear.

“Boy and bear,” Colonel said.

“Very handsome,” I lied. “What’s his name?”

“Andre.”

The shock of hearing Colonel Parker say his Dutch name, something he had ferociously protected from the world for 65 years, made me mute.

Finally, he turned to Loanne. “Get your picture back.”

“She’s not going to steal it, Colonel,” Loanne laughed.

But the Colonel trusted no one. He was a carny to the last, even if for one second, unlike with FDR’s old Potomac, he had presented the side he never wanted to show.

Alanna Nash has written four books about Elvis, including The Colonel: The Extraordinary Story of Colonel Tom Parker and Elvis Presley.