According to last year's "The Inner Elvis," written by psychologist Peter Whitmer, Presley's problems with Parker were rooted in his desperate mama's-boy relationship with Gladys Presley. According to Whitmer, Parker was "a perfect psychological amalgam of an idealized mother. . . . After Gladys' death in 1958, Tom Parker became Gladys Presley," with whom he shared such physical attributes as a rotund body and a round face with double chin. Whitmer also writes that Gladys and the Colonel were both "masters of passive-aggressive manipulation {who} used subtle set-pieces of controlling behaviour with which they could coax and entice, rather than shout or push, to make their point. . . . Forever supplicant before those he perceived as authoritarian, in this regard Elvis was like a weather vane in a strong wind." My Boy Elvis: The Colonel Tom Parker Story is another great book on Parker.
And Tom Parker was a hurricane, one who first touched down on American shores in Hoboken, N.J., in 1927, after having stowed away on a ship. Soon after, Andres Cornelius van Kuijk became Thomas Parker and joined the Army ("Colonel" was an honorary title bestowed many years later by Louisiana Gov. Jimmie Davis, writer and first singer of "You Are My Sunshine"). After the Army, Parker gravitated to Florida, America's circus capital, and began honing the skills that would serve him so well with Presley. For a while he was an advance man for a traveling circus, slipping into a town to slap up posters, goad the local media and generally stir things up. It was a process he never abandoned, and sometimes you could find traces of that, as when Parker hired a troupe of midgets to parade around Los Angeles, provoking boat loads of copy about the Elvis Presley Midget Fan Club. Even at the height of Presley's fame, Parker himself would sometimes hawk programs, photos and buttons to fans waiting to get into a venue. That aggressive attitude was a metaphor for the Colonel's stance after Aug. 15, 1955, when Presley signed a usurious contract naming Parker his "sole and exclusive adviser, personal representative and manager." The standard manager's fee then (as now) was 10 to 15 percent, but Parker started at 25 percent. In 1966, he jacked it up to an unheard-of 50 percent.
When Col. Tom Parker passed away Tuesday at the age of 87, it marked the death of a super-salesman whose one and only product -- Elvis Presley -- became the catalyst for a worldwide cultural revolution. Parker, a onetime carnival barker, never had a clue about Presley's sociological impact, didn't particularly care for rock-and-roll, and certainly didn't care for the fans. They were just marks. He couldn't have cared much for Presley, either. When the singer died in August 1977, the first thing Parker told an associate was: "This won't change anything." And even as Presley was undergoing an autopsy in Memphis, Parker was putting the finishing touches on a souvenir merchandise deal, the final chapter in his client's transformation from cultural oddity to commercial commodity. Parker and Presley represent the convergence of two characters from carnival culture: the poor country boy who grabs the brass ring and the mysterious stranger who fleeces the innocent. The Colonel was often described as a cross between P.T. Barnum and W.C. Fields; in the King's court, he was combination court jester, Svengali and Robin Hood. For Parker, success was never measured by creative achievement, only by financial payoff, understandable since the bigger the pot, the bigger his portion. When million-dollar offers would come in for a concert or some other project, Parker would smile and say, "That's plenty for me, but what about my boy?" And he wasn't joking.
Everything had its price, including Parker, who offered himself for interviews at $25,000 for small talk, $100,000 for long conversation. Neither situation promised anything resembling truth, of course. Admittedly, the Colonel was a character -- fat, oblivious to fashion, possessed of a strange, unexplained accent. But he was a cipher, as well. It wasn't until Albert Goldman's 1981 Presley biography that the world learned Col. Tom Parker was really Andres van Kuijk of the Netherlands. By that time, he'd been an illegal alien here for half a century, as well as an inadvertent cultural revolutionary by proxy. And just as Presley's greatest fear was that everything would suddenly disappear, fear of discovery and deportation kept Parker from ever fully enjoying the fruits of his client's labors. Parker was the world's highest-paid manager. And since he demanded additional payments as adviser, consultant, technical director and so on, he actually made more in commissions and consultancies on some films than Presley did.
About the same time as the RCA deal, Parker formed Boxcar Enterprises to handle Elvis merchandising, with Presley getting only 15 percent. Eventually, of course, the dancing chickens came home to roost. During an estate hearing in 1980, an alert Memphis judge questioned Parker's 50-percent commission as well as other elements of his contract and appointed a lawyer to represent and defend the interests of Lisa Marie Presley, then 13. The court subsequently declared Parker "guilty of self-dealing and overreaching" and said he had "handled affairs not in Elvis's but his own interest." Calling Elvis "naive, shy and unassertive" and Parker "aggressive, shrewd and tough," it closed the book on any further dealings between him and the estate. After being exposed in Goldman's Presley book and sued by the Presley estate, the Colonel proved wily as ever. He filed legal papers suggesting that since he'd served in the U.S. Army without permission from the Dutch government, he had automatically forfeited his citizenship there. Since he had never applied for U.S. citizenship, he was essentially a man without a country and no one had jurisdiction over him. Such tactics delayed resolution so long that the Presley estate finally settled with Parker, and he received a $2 million settlement from RCA Records. That was the last money he made from Elvis.
The Colonel had a bag of tricks that went all the way back to his carny days such as:
- Selling Elvis to Hollywood ''I dont want to read the script cose I cant read and write but how much are you going to pay me? We'll give you $25k. -That is exactly what I wanted, but how much are you going to pay Elvis?
- Never letting Elvis play to venues that aren't overflowing with people out onto the street.
- Telling promoters that they can have Elvis for $12k when other promoters are paying $10k for him.
- In the circus the Colonel had a dancing chicken act. The chicken danced because it was standing on a hot plate.
- Only released a limited number of records per year not to saturate the market.
- Invented an exclusive club called the Snowmens League Of America to keep people loyal. It was free to join but $1k to leave. The club celebrated the art of the con trick. ''We've never lost a member yet.''
- He would get his watch out and hypnotise members of the Memphis Mafia and make them pretend to be a dog.
- He would solicit donations for dogs, and also charge people to bury their dogs, charge grieving people if they wanted flowers, and also providing mini tombstones.
- To check if Elvis wasnt too fat for his next movie he would have girls hug his waist to see if he'd put in extra weight.
- Made Elvis pretend to be single so women would think he was available.
- Used TV commercials with the only word being ELVIS!
- Threatened the Presley family after Elvis died, that he was gonna build an Elvis museum, complete with a massive parking lot. The Presley family settled in buying the whole of the Colonels memorabilia museum for $1million. The biggest snow job he did.
- Sold advertising space in his unpublished/unwritten autobiography book 'How Much Does It Cost If It's Free.'
- While working at a hotdog booth in Florida, to make extra money he would cut out the middle bit on the foot long hot dog, fill the middle with sauerkraut and just have the meat sticking out at both ends. If someone complained he would say that they must have dropped it.
- He made ends meet by painting sparrows yellow and selling them as canaries.
- If Elvis wore his own clothes in a movie he was entitled to an extra $10k, even if he was only wearing a watch.
- In 1973 he organized a live world satellite telecast. He got the idea after watching Nixon's live broadcast from China.
- Sold 'I Hate Elvis' badges.
- He considered his artists his main passion, ''you're my hobby''.
- He invented the patent medicine Hadacol drink which included alcohol.
- Sensing a marketing opportunity that no music manager had every considered before, Colonel Parker signed a deal with a Beverly Hills movie merchandiser for $40,000.
- In just a few months, over 50 different Elvis-themed products were produced, from charm bracelets and necklaces, to scarves, teddy bear perfume, Topps bubble gum cards, and sneakers... to record players, hats, and lipsticks in "Heartbreak Pink" and "Hound Dog Orange" - sold with the slogan, "Keep Me Always On Your Lips."
- When asked about the deal between him and Elvis, the Colonel responded: “That’s not true at all. He takes 50 per cent of everything I earn.”
- He'd say ''this is probably gonna be Elvis' last film so we should double the price.''
- Even after his death, Parker continued business as usual: 'Elvis didn't die,' he said, 'The body did.'
- The Snowmen's League Of America booklet only had two written pages then all the other pages were blank. ''A real Snowman reads between the lines.''
- He liked to rub peoples curly hair and say ''now you can tell people the Colonel rubbed your head, you're gonna be a star!''
- Gradually, Parker eased out competition to become the gyrating teen's 'sole and exclusive adviser, personal representative and manager.' So read their ironclad contract.
- He used to say, 'You don't have to be nice to people on the way up if you're not coming back down.'
- He sold 500 spare penmamt sticks as ''Elvis special Pearl Harbour Day special: Teddy Bear Toothpicks'' to the Vegas hotel's Japanese tourists.
- One of his fav saying was ''I'll be very happy if you buy something.''
- To build credit with Las Vegas casino managers he would send someone to borrow $500, he'd than put it in an evelope in his desk, not touch it, and at the end of the Las Vegas residency give it back.
- He would send his assistant Kenny Wynn on a 4 hour flight from Vegas to Palm Springs to pick up some catfish in his fridge and then fly back to Vegas.
- He had a very unusual mind. Most people have one voice of inner dialogue. It's our inner thought. We think all the time, words are formulated in our minds. That's our thinking process. Colonel had multi levels of inner dialogue.
- Parker had total recall. Colonel never made notes. He carried everything in his mind. And when someone would ask him a question about something that occurred maybe six months ago, or 20 years ago, his replay invariably was, 'Let me run my tapes'. And he would sit for a minute, and then he would bring the answer out.
- He bought 900 pairs of binoculars from Army surplus for 90 cents a pair and sold them at a dollar each (10 cent profit) at the back of the auditorium. 'They had just plain glass in them, but they looked good' he admitted.
- During his carnival days he gypped rube carnival goers with a quarter glued to the side of his ring.
- When he was a dog catcher in order to give the dogs new homes he would hild contests for people to win a dog.
- He also had a Flower Contract and people would pay him to put fresh flowers on peoples graves. Only he would go at night to different florists and get the old flowers for free. When people complained that the flowers didnt look good he would say '' well you should have been here yesteday they looked wonderful.''