The Colonel and the King, page 10
They were, he felt, an unassailable team.
FOR THE PERSONAL APPEARANCES that Eddy did continue to make, Tom and Eddy had long since put together a kind of self-contained revue, the type of variety show (with comedy skits, a strong supporting cast, and music that encompassed a wide range of musical eras and presentations) with which they had first started on the Jamup and Honey tent show. The difference, of course, was that the Eddy Arnold Show was entirely selected and paid for by the star and his manager.
In the summer of 1951, they added a new act, the Dickens Sisters from Chicago, three singing sisters, Nancy, Margie, and Patti Diskin, whose brother Tom had volunteered to serve as their manager and on-the-road protector. Since getting out of the navy, Tom had been working as office manager and general factotum for his best friend and high school classmate, Al Dvorin, who had a booking agency with an unending supply of specialty acts, including “Ventriloquists, Jugglers, Animal Trainers, Midgets, and All-Girl Orchestras.” When Tom went to Dvorin for advice, Al told his friend that while he didn’t want to lose him, this was a break that he and his sisters couldn’t afford to turn down, and he all but pushed his more buttoned-up office manager out the door.
Tom and his new boss, Tom Parker, hit it off from the start. Tom Diskin was a bright, outgoing, mild-mannered young man, who, as Al Dvorin said, could organize even the paper clips on your desk. One might have thought there could be no two people with greater differences of outlook and temperament than the “Two Toms,” but Tom Parker instantly recognized the young man’s qualities and capabilities. He learned he could trust him with the smallest details and count on him for the kind of loyalty you couldn’t buy for any price. Soon he started relying on him not only to help set up the tours but to provide creative suggestions for their improvement. And he found in Tom Diskin someone who was able to provide the perfect foil for his own instinctively introverted nature, with the capacity to smooth over words that might sound rough coming out of his own mouth and represent policies that he knew would be best for all involved without ruffling any feathers. It seemed sometimes as if the two of them could almost finish each other’s thoughts and sentences, though there was never any doubt about who was in charge.
Colonel and Marie with the Bonja family. Courtesy of Ron Bonja
Before long, he and Marie were drawn into the extended family life of the Diskins. (There were ten Diskin siblings and the second-oldest daughter, Helen, who lived in Alhambra with her husband, Ben Bonja, had ten children of her own.) Tom Parker became a second “Uncle Tom” to the Bonja family, and the two Toms and Marie visited them every time they were in California with a station wagon full of groceries. “It was always great to see them,” recalled Ron Bonja, the second-oldest of the four boys. “When they arrived, it was like Christmas.” Also, their second Uncle Tom was a very funny guy, prancing about in his suspenders, always indulging the kids with treats and jokes. They would all audition for Uncle Tom, singing popular songs like “Goodnight Irene,” and he would solemnly—or not so solemnly—reward them with prizes and praise. After dinner he would sit back and light up a big cigar and tell them stories about show business and carnival days. Their home movies show a man comfortably disheveled and utterly relaxed, ensconced in the bosom of yet another family he was happy to embrace as his own. This second Uncle Tom, who would later be called Uncle Colonel, and not simply to avoid confusion, was always fun.
Within a year of their first meeting, Tom Parker had prevailed upon Tom Diskin to set up his own management company and booking agency, which, taking its name from Eddy’s Checkerboard Jamboree radio show, would be called Jamboree Attractions and located in the basement of Tom Diskin’s family home. Al Dvorin donated some office furniture and helped his friend get things going, and soon Al, a hulking bighearted man who looked like a gangster but always appreciated a good kidder (“The first thing I sent Colonel Parker,” he recalled, “was a Top Banana hat, and he sent me back some Purina pens and a miniature covered wagon”), was fully enlisted in Tom Parker’s business, too, providing “little people” and novelty acts for Purina mill openings, and entering into a lifelong association with Parker in which he played many different roles but is best known as the rough-hewn voice intoning “Elvis Has Left the Building” at the conclusion of all of Elvis’ ’70s concerts.
Jamboree Attractions, with Tom Diskin as a 25 percent partner, started somewhat haltingly at first as a convenient way to put the Eddy Arnold Show on the road without its star. Tom Parker was still in charge, Tom Diskin made that very clear to bookers, but he would be going out with the tour himself “to manage the show and attend to [the] details.” In no time, though, it became an entity all its own, actively managing not just the Dickens Sisters but a whole host of country music performers, including Tommy Sands, a fifteen-year-old singer from Houston and Shreveport in whom Tom Parker had long taken an interest.
And while Jamboree Attractions (and its new publishing subsidiary, Jamboree Music) continued to use Tom Diskin’s Chicago address as its sole acknowledged place of business, and there was no overt mention of the other Tom’s active participation in its management, Tom Parker was never less than a thinly veiled presence in all its activities—which, as time went on, made more and more sense to them both, given how little Eddy was now on the road and how much the overseeing of his long-term contracts and commitments came down to matters of “administration,” which his manager attended to with all of his usual attention to detail but which failed to fully engage either his time or his interest.
Colonel with a sixteen-year-old Tommy Sands (in cowboy hat) and friends, 1953. Courtesy of Tommy Sands
NINETEEN FIFTY-THREE was shaping up to be their best year yet. Purina renewed its $100,000-a-year exclusive radio deal, and the five-year radio-and-television deal with NBC was finalized through the continuing efforts of William Morris. In exchange for NBC exclusivity, this would guarantee Eddy well over $50,000 a year with various fringe benefits, including extending his RCA contract, with its most-favored-nation clause, for the full length of the NBC term. In May Eddy would be playing at the recently opened Hotel Sahara in Las Vegas for the first time, a big step up from El Rancho, at $17,500 for a two-week booking. Prior to that, he would once again play the Houston Fat Stock Show (later renamed the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo and billed as “the largest livestock and rodeo show in the world”) at $21,500 for twelve days. And apart from the formalization of the NBC deal, he had been doing more and more TV, serving as the replacement host for Mrs. Parker’s favorite singer, Perry Como, the previous summer and already booked to do the same for Dinah Shore in the summer of ’53.
And then there was the Eddy Arnold string tie, a gimmick understandably dear to Tom Parker’s heart. Eddy had always been partial to string ties, and as the slim Western version of the bow tie became more and more popular (Arthur Godfrey wore one; so, unsurprisingly, did the governors of Texas and Louisiana), his manager got the idea of creating a customized model. He discovered that the wife of Western-film-and-TV sidekick Andy Devine, an old pal from the Gene Austin days, had started a company that specialized in making the ties, and he commissioned scores of them with Eddy’s name imprinted on the neckband. In the first year alone, he boasted to a reporter on a brief stopover in Tampa, he had given away one thousand to “radio and television stars, public officials, [and] disc jockeys,” strictly as a promotional stunt. He himself would never be seen without one, he said, and in the picture accompanying the story Marie is shown making sure his tie is on straight. “If it would help Eddy Arnold,” he declared with evident good humor, “I would wear earmuffs.”
He was more than likely wearing a string tie when he received his second honorary Colonel appointment later that year, this time from newly elected Tennessee governor Frank Clement, whom he had helped in his 1952 campaign. He was genuinely tickled by the public recognition (like Elvis Presley’s future discoverer Sam Phillips, he was a big fan of Governor Clement’s personality and progressive politics), but in fact he was more amused than impressed. As he told Tampa Tribune columnist Paul Wilder a few years later when one of the two Shetland ponies he had donated to the Florida Sheriffs Boys Ranch gave birth to a colt and the boys named it “Little Colonel” in his honor: “I must be the only phony Colonel who has a real Little Colonel named after him.”
The only evident cloud on the horizon was a heart condition that had begun to manifest itself and culminated in a heart attack that spring, leading to a doctor’s warning to lose weight and get off the road. Losing weight seemed out of the question, but, he rationalized, he had Tom Diskin now to take a lot of pressure off him. Still, even with Eddy’s drastically reduced personal-appearance schedule, his manager, the newly crowned Tennessee Colonel, seemed to be traveling as much as ever, his mind too restless to settle down so long as there was a new deal to be made.
THE FIRST INKLING OF TROUBLE came in Las Vegas, just after Tommy Sands signed a full-representation contract with Jamboree Attractions, and his shadow manager was doing everything he could to get him signed to RCA. That is when it became clear to Eddy Arnold for the first time that he was no longer enjoying an exclusive arrangement with his manager. He confronted Parker, and Tom even offered to quit, but Eddy wasn’t ready to take that drastic a step yet (“I just ignored him for several days”), and it seemed like they were back on a firm footing once again. For Mother’s Day, Billboard reported admiringly, Tom Parker had set up a deal with every radio station in Las Vegas to play Eddy’s new To Mother album and, just coincidentally, promote his Sahara appearance. And when the engagement was over, as usual they each went their separate ways.
But Eddy’s feelings of resentment continued to fester (“I was displeased about the exclusivity; his take on me [of 25 percent] was for exclusivity”), and on August 21 he wrote a letter to his manager, which began, “Dear Tom, I really hate to write this letter,” and went on to detail in the briefest and most civil of terms all the causes for his discontent, including the formation of Jamboree. “I am convinced,” he wrote, “that our further association cannot work out and think upon sober reflection that you will agree with me. Of course, aside from this I do not agree with many of the methods you employ in doing business. Also, I had thought since your recent illness you would possibly slow down a bit so that it would make working with you a greater pleasure, however, it is my feeling that you have done just the opposite.”
He wanted, he stipulated, “to make a cash settlement with you based upon a fair and equitable consideration.” And he ended in the same straightforward but gracious manner that anyone who knew Eddy Arnold would have expected: “I wish to take this opportunity to thank you for the many things that you have done in my behalf, and assure you that in the termination of this arrangement I feel it best for the both of us and certainly I will be happier. We started as friends, let’s end the same way.”
Tom was devastated. Nothing like this had happened to him since his dismissal by Royal American, long before he knew the business, or even knew himself well enough to conduct business in the manner in which it needed to be conducted. He had let his guard down. He had been blind to any signs of trouble that under normal circumstances he would have picked up right away. And, once again, he had no one to blame but himself. He had let himself forget the fundamental inequities that the world was always prepared to set in your path.
It took him eight days, and several drafts, to formulate his four-page, single-spaced reply, and even then, while it can stand as a masterpiece of lawyerlike concision, running down close to a dozen carefully elucidated, closely argued points, it was, for all of his resolve to hew to the language of business, practically bristling with hurt.
“I have, from the first day we teamed up together planned for the future of you and the future of myself, not just to have it blown up,” he wrote in an early draft, which pretty well expressed the theme throughout.
As you know I have invested a good deal of my earnings back into you as a personality which I always was happy to do. But not with the idea of letting some one person or representation department cash in without having any investment in you on what I have done towards building you into a First Class Attraction which you are today. [Furthermore], I will state that not being able to put the direct credit in words that you are responsible for fifty percent of your standing as an artist today and I am the other half with all the other elements tied-in to make this possible. Without these you or I could not have gone as far as we have.
There was more, much more. Where Eddy had brought up the matter of Jamboree Attractions (“My discontent has been increased since the organization of your agency known as the Jamboree Attractions”), his manager felt compelled to point out that not three months ago “this was straightened out in Las Vegas. Your desire there was voiced very strongly for me to remain with you and I did.” And furthermore, it was hard to understand how it could have taken nine years “before you found out that my methods of business did not agree with you [even] when they somehow paid off. And I have never heard of anyone that I could not do business with again for you or anyone else in this field, except perhaps for some people that could not get the right deal that would have been good FOR THEM ONLY AND NOT FOR YOU AND I.…
“In making our settlement,” he stresses more than once, “there is no place for either one of us to bring up our faults, dislikes, mistakes or shortcomings of which I like any other human have my share.” And then he accepts without objection Eddy’s suggestion that they use Eddy’s lawyer, Bill Carpenter, as an intermediary in the negotiations—so long as it is understood that Mr. Carpenter’s role will be that of “a friend and not an attorney for I know that he is a fair person and will be just as fair with his advice if I need it as he will be with you.” At which point he reminds Eddy that “I am not able to get worked up in my condition and will do my utmost to control myself. Should we somehow misunderstand and let our emotions run away with ourselves,” he adds in what is perhaps his most telling admission, “I will depart from the meeting as a very unhappy person but not a defeated one.” And he would “remain Mr. Carpenter’s friend [and] understand that this can have no relation between us at anytime. And I will respect his trust in me for this will never cause me to waiver in my belief that he will do whatever he feels is right for you.”
In the end it was worked out in a manner that seemed fair to all. Tom Parker would receive $60,000 (roughly $710,000 in 2024 money), representing perhaps a 20 percent commission on a full year’s work, and in exchange forfeit all interest in any and all ongoing or future deals, including the ones with RCA, NBC, and Purina that he had so painstakingly initiated. But then, in steadfast service to the amicable spirit he was determined to maintain, Eddy wrote in a side letter that “you are authorized to book me for ten (10) personal appearances during 1954.” Which would serve as a template for Tom Parker’s continuing involvement in Eddy’s career over the next twenty-five years, including prestigious Las Vegas bookings in the ’70s, after Elvis Presley had returned to live performing and established himself as Las Vegas’ reigning star. And it permitted them to continue as they had started, in Eddy’s words, as friends, which they remained until Thomas A. Parker’s death forty-four years later, when Eddy spoke with characteristic affection and restraint at the invitation-only memorial service at the Las Vegas Hilton.
What followed was perhaps even more surprising than what preceded it. Others might have sat around salving their wounds and living off a cash settlement that could easily have carried them for three years without ever having to think about money. But Colonel Tom Parker—for it was from this point on that he assumed the sobriquet almost without exception with all newcomers to his world and, increasingly, with old acquaintances as well—instantly went back to work.
On September 14, just ten days after the settlement, he proposed to Steve Sholes that he assemble an RCA package tour to showcase some of the label’s finest country artists, an idea that Sholes immediately embraced, though it took another three months to agree on terms and finalize all the details. It took even longer to do all the meticulous work of coordinating dates and finding venues that could accommodate all of the artists’ different schedules, but in the end the RCA Victor Country & Western Caravan kicked off in Asheville, North Carolina, on April 25, 1954, concluding in Little Rock on May 9. The Colonel had added four dates to RCA’s original ten, making the argument to Steve Sholes that they could reach far more people with this expanded schedule, and, with careful control of costs, he could bring it in for the same price. “The outcome must be victory [on every level]—time, effort, and money,” he wrote to Tom Diskin in an internal memorandum not intended for RCA consumption. “We must sell records. We must have a good show. We must do it right [or else] learn how to clean auditoriums and get jobs as janitors.”
The outcome was indeed victory. The tour was, from everyone’s point of view, an unqualified success, carried out with all of Tom Parker’s customary aplomb. Nor was Parker’s ability to handle every situation that came up and tamp down every potential crisis lost on its headliner, Hank Snow, a feisty thirty-nine-year-old Canadian transplant who in the last three years (under the aegis of Steve Sholes) had become one of the top stars in the new country music firmament. (His “I Don’t Hurt Anymore” would soon become the number-one hit of 1954.) At the end of the tour Snow wrote to his new friend, Tom Parker, about “one of the greatest record promotions I have ever been connected with.” And it wasn’t just the promotion, it was the care and concern that Parker showed to every artist. He particularly appreciated the way that when he went out onstage, Parker was always “down front giving me a hand.” And he signed off, “Your friend always, HANK SNOW.”
