The Colonel and the King, page 25
But as per his agreement Ad took no pictures, although his brother appears to have thoughtfully provided him with a random assortment of publicity shots, mostly taken at Colonel’s home and office in Madison, Tennessee, that he could show to anyone he pleased and pass off as intimate glimpses of his famous brother Colonel Parker relaxing at home in Hollywood. For Ad, after all his dreams of movie-star glamour and entrepreneurial opportunity, it must have been a crushing disappointment. In the evening (and they were all early evenings, because Colonel was up at five each morning and out of the house), Dries might relax in his bathrobe as they sat in front of the big RCA console TV that he boasted was a grateful gift from the record company. There was an array of gold records on the wall, and Elvis pictures and memorabilia everywhere, as well as artificial flower arrangements and a small sampling from Marie’s extensive teacup collection.
There was a piano, too, which Marie loved to play, lighthearted, bouncy tunes for the most part in addition to what Ad recognized as hymns, presented in much the same manner. She was clearly, it must have struck her brother-in-law from the days that they spent together, a bright, energetic person. But at the same time she had obviously been thoroughly instructed by her husband not to give anything away. And when Dries cleared his throat and addressed him directly in that old-fashioned guttural Rotterdam accent, Ad never failed to respond politely with news of the family, prompts that he hoped might lead them to more productive topics of conversation. But they never did.
The one thing that the two of them always seemed to get stuck on was their mother’s death. When he first arrived, Ad had presented his brother with Maria Elisabeth Ponsie van Kuijk’s “mourning card,” almost as if it were a proof of identity, but Dries kept returning to what he claimed to be his original reason for cutting off contact with home. At the end of the war, he said, he had met a man from Tilburg who had served in Holland’s Princess Irene Brigade. “He told me that Mother had died. She was in fact my only true tie with Holland, and when she was dead Holland was dead for me.” And while Dries now realized that the information he had received was incorrect, there appeared to be nothing Ad could say or do to restore that sense of connection.
On his brother’s last day in Los Angeles, or perhaps it was the day before, Dries unexpectedly asked if he would like to meet Elvis, and, after summoning Irv Schechter, he took Ad to see his artist.
There are a number of different versions of the story, each of which had its own variations. In some, the meeting took place in Elvis’ bungalow on the studio lot. In others, which Colonel’s second wife, Loanne, believed to be true, the young William Morris agent drove Colonel and Ad to Elvis’ home in Bel Air, though whether Schechter simply waited in the car or went in is not universally agreed upon. What is agreed upon, wherever the meeting took place, and whether or not any outside observers were present, was that Colonel made no attempt to disguise the relationship, he simply introduced this skinny, dark-haired, almost vulpine-looking middle-aged man who spoke virtually no English as “my brother”—which Elvis appeared to accept with equanimity, never breathing a word of the relationship to a single soul.
Long after the fact, after Elvis was dead, some of Elvis’ cohorts, none of whom had ever had the slightest suspicion that Colonel was not from somewhere in the South, if not literally from Huntington, West Virginia, doubted that this meeting could possibly have taken place, suggesting that Colonel would never have entrusted such vital confidential information to their boss, when everyone knew that Elvis couldn’t keep a secret. But, evidently, at least this one time he did.
Ad kept his side of the bargain, too. He never said a word to any of his brothers and sisters about the substance of his visit, about anything their brother had said or promised, other than, “He sends you all his greetings.” But he made it clear that Dries had no interest in hearing anything further from any of them or staying in touch at all.
He delivered his story to Rosita, but his account was so fanciful, his son observed, that some members of his family were not convinced that he had gone to America at all. The story appeared in three successive issues in July and was made up for the most part of well-worn tales that Ad, or more likely the magazine, had gleaned from a 1960 article in Time magazine and fan-club publications, along with a few family stories. The “exclusive” photographs that accompanied it amounted almost entirely to snapshots Colonel had sent to his old school friend Cees Frijters when he was in the army and stock photos of Elvis and the Colonel, along with two snapshots of Ad’s arrival in New York. And when Colonel spoke in what was purported to be his own voice, it was to spin stories that were so outlandish as to be just plain laughable, introducing one extended anecdote, for example, by suggesting that for a time he and his wife had been so destitute they couldn’t even afford a postage stamp. “Sometimes we had to live on a dollar a week. We slept in horse stables behind the horses. I did all kinds of things then. I went to the Indian territory, where I pretended to be a big wise white man. It so happened that sometimes I really predicted the future.” With the war, he said, “I organized parties for the army, and that’s how I got into the world of show business.… I’ve been a dogcatcher, and I sold hot dogs. But I didn’t want you to know all the things that I did.”
It was Dutch journalist Dirk Vellenga’s theory that Ad concocted this weird mélange in order to purposefully confuse the reader. “From the beginning,” said Ad Jr., “it was clear that my father wanted to protect the Colonel and not give any trouble. He had a fear perhaps that there could be problems for the Colonel if he were too bold with [his] answers and articles, and so he was very careful about [his] position.” The very ridiculousness of the story was the reason “no magazine or newspaper picked it up,” wrote Vellenga, who came to Breda in 1973, at age twenty-six, to work for the newspaper De Stem, and would go on to do much of the pioneering research into Andre van Kuijk’s early life and origins. If anyone even thought about digging any further, Vellenga said, they gave up “after a meaningless conversation with Ad van Kuijk, who stated that he wanted to forget the whole thing.” And so, as hard as it may be to believe in this hyperconnected age, while everyone in the Netherlands was well aware of the true identity of Colonel Tom Parker, the rest of the world remained blissfully unaware.
It was Ad Jr.’s abiding suspicion, and Colonel’s widow Loanne’s firm belief, that Colonel continued for many years to send money to his brother through the van Kuyks. But Ad Sr. seemed to take any sums he received not as money intended for the family but as funds specifically meant to help him out in his various business ventures. The rest of the family, who never learned of the money, was split in their feelings, though not in their belief that they were being lied to by their brother. But in a family that had never had any cohesion to begin with and was now scattered across the country, there was no real impetus for dealing with either Ad or Dries, and, despite his sisters’ fond recollections of their mischievous little brother, the family as a whole seemed stuck in a permanent state of disgruntled disinterest.
Ad Sr. intimated to his son that Dries had made three promises to him, but his father never shared with him what they were. One of them, Ad Jr. believed, was a commitment to help his father move to America, but that never came to pass because his mother, who had always been her son’s principal defender and, besides that, had no interest in emigrating herself, put her foot down. She was not about to see their only child leave his university studies in Utrecht, she said, when he was so close to achieving his baccalaureate degree. Which in fact he did and went on to teach high-school German very happily for the next thirty-nine years. Ad Jr. never found out what the other two promises were (though one might surmise they had something to do with money), because, as he observed, his father was not in the habit of sharing confidences with anyone.
As for Colonel, he was more committed than ever to working out a plan for Elvis to return to live performance. But first he had to fulfill all their film commitments. After completing Blue Hawaii, which would turn out to be the biggest box-office hit of his career, Elvis went on to make two movies in rapid succession for United Artists at a salary of $600,000 apiece plus 50 percent of the profits. He next completed another film for Hal Wallis, once again set in Hawaii, in early May of 1962, and started on the first of the four films in the new MGM contract four months later. By then, though, Colonel had worked out a plan for entirely revamping Elvis’ career.
The idea was for RCA to finance a tour in which Elvis would appear in forty-three cities under the sponsorship of RCA’s forty-three distributors, with a press conference in each city and a guaranteed overall payment of over $1 million. The tour would be under the aegis and sole direction of Colonel’s umbrella company, All Star Shows, and to prove his good faith Colonel even put off a second MGM picture till the following year in order to have two months free and clear for touring.
The talks went on for some time, but then, it seemed, RCA got cold feet—perhaps it was simply that they were not in the touring business—and Colonel wasn’t interested in their proposal to scale the number of dates down to eleven for a flat $500,000. It wasn’t worth doing if it wasn’t going to be done right, Colonel said, and if RCA lacked the nerve to back what would undoubtedly have been one of the Biggest Tours in Show Business History, it was better to wait. He was sure other opportunities would come along.
They never did—at least not for another seven years, when Colonel made another million-dollar deal, this time with the International Hotel in Las Vegas, which agreed to pay Elvis $125,000 a week for eight weeks’ work in 1969 and 1970. And subsequently Elvis did return to touring for the last seven years of his life. But after Ad van Kuijk’s visit in 1961, there was, for whatever reason, whether judiciously considered or out of a newly reawakened sense of caution, no more talk of a world tour.
PART III
SUSPICIOUS MINDS
FOURTEEN
Lateral Thinking
THERE’S A LOT MORE to the rest of the story, obviously. There were a lot of deals, there were triumphs and failures, and an unimaginable amount of money was made, but this is intended as an introduction to Colonel, primarily in his own words. For more details on the business of Elvis, the intricacies of the negotiations, the staggering sums that were at stake, and the ways in which the money was spent, you can check out any number of sources, including the second volume of my Elvis Presley biography, Careless Love, where this all gets plenty of attention.
Suffice it to say that with the spectacular success of Blue Hawaii (it was the fourteenth-highest-grossing film of 1961, though it was released in November, and by the end of 1962 it had earned a profit of $2.7 million), the die was cast. As Colonel summed it up for Variety in January 1964, Elvis had made fifteen pictures (amounting to eleven films since his army discharge in March of 1960), and they had earned $75 million in box-office receipts to date. His film salaries for the last year alone added up to $1.5 million, with “50% of [the] films’ profits due on top of that figure.”
As to the quality of the films, the Colonel was always happy to volunteer that once the deal was made, the studio took over. After all, “What do I know about production? Nothing.” As far as winning an Oscar went, Colonel had a similarly disingenuous response. If anyone came to him looking for Elvis to take a salary reduction because of the Oscar-worthiness of their picture, all they had to do was to pay him his regular salary up front, and if Elvis won an Oscar, Colonel would be more than happy to refund the money. There had been, Colonel added, no takers to date—and unlikely to be any. “We don’t have approval on scripts,” Colonel continued on this theme, “only money. Anyway, what’s Elvis need? A couple of songs, a little story and some nice people with him.”
Colonel and Hal Wallis in paper hats that Colonel had specially manufactured for promotion purposes, with a display celebrating the release of G. I. Blues, fall 1960. Courtesy of the Graceland Archives
It was, as usual, a bravura performance, but you will notice, there’s no talk of lofty cinematic goals, there’s no mention of Marlon Brando or James Dean, or any of the other actors Elvis admired, as there always had been at the start (and long past the start, in Colonel’s correspondence about future projects). Nor is there any acknowledgment of the commercial failure of the two serious, nonsinging pictures that Elvis did for 20th Century Fox (Flaming Star and Wild in the Country) in between Hal Wallis’ G. I. Blues and Blue Hawaii—which undoubtedly had something to do with the choices made. Instead, Variety simply took Colonel’s carefully calculated portrait of self-regard at face value, quoting his mantra, “Look, you got a product, you sell it,” as if there were not even a smidgen of irony in it. And to his evident delight, nearly everyone else bought the pitch: this was Colonel Parker, the self-proclaimed carnival barker with a host of good stories, who told more than one reporter with relish (and with even greater relish for the way in which they in turn capitalized on the carefully constructed image), “The [Hollywood] big shots are afraid to be seen with me. Saves a whole lot of time.”
Now and then a reporter chose to look past his rube-in-Hollywood act—his old pal in Tampa, Paul Wilder, for one, and, later, Elvis biographer Jerry Hopkins—and that seemed to delight him even more. “The Colonel,” Hopkins wrote in the ’70s, “projected an image of cornpone simplicity,” but that was simply “camouflage.” The Colonel, according to Hopkins, had developed a process of illogical “lateral” thinking which could be compared to that of Maltese philosopher Edward de Bono, even if Colonel’s philosophy, perhaps best expressed in the literature of the Snowmen’s League of America, came first. “Lateral thinking,” as Hopkins explained it, involved “pattern-switching,” or approaching a problem indirectly and then doing something so entirely unexpected, or even outrageous, that it generated both laughter and reassessment, in either order. And what could be more Colonel than that?
In 1961, Colonel made his one and only stab at developing a movie of his own. He had always said, from the time he first went out with Ernest Tubb in pre–Eddy Arnold days (this was the tour on which, in addition to serving as road manager, he had forged an onstage role for himself as a country comedian), that he wanted to make his mark in Hollywood—and indeed he could certainly be said to have done that. But now, beyond merely guiding his artist’s career, he sought to acquire the film rights to naturalist Joy Adamson’s current number-one bestseller, Born Free, which told the story of how she and her husband had raised a lion cub named Elsa after Elsa’s mother was killed. Though Colonel’s reading habits were generally limited to informational nonfiction and the trades, his deep love of animals had never waned, and through William Morris he made a modest offer for the book. Adamson’s publisher responded that a number of leading film companies had been in touch with higher offers, but they would still like to know just what Colonel Parker had in mind. But that was the end of it. Colonel simply withdrew, suggesting meekly that he did not have the wherewithal to compete with the major studios in rendering the “authenticity” that such a picture surely deserved. And so we will never know what Colonel might have made of this opportunity, just as we will never know what might have happened if Hal Wallis had taken him up on his offer of a screenwriting collaboration that would create for Elvis more “rugged” roles. But then both were well outside his area of expertise, and as one of his close friends (like all of his close friends a keen admirer of Colonel’s acumen) observed, “He wouldn’t play a game he didn’t know how to win.”
Celebrating his fifty-first birthday two or three days early on the set of G. I. Blues, June 23 or 24, 1960, with Marie by his side, Elvis in uniform, Nick Adams in his Johnny Yuma–Rebel hat (left), and Hal Wallis peering over Colonel’s shoulder. Courtesy of the Graceland Archive
He did, however, continue to freely dispense advice, both business and personal, and do everything he could to advance the careers of young protégés like Tommy Sands, actor Nick Adams (in addition to helping get Adams his starring role in the television series The Rebel, he was godfather to Adams’ daughter, Allyson), and, most recently, screen newcomer George Hamilton. For the twenty-one-year-old Hamilton, who came to him looking for guidance after costarring in Home from the Hill with Robert Mitchum (a publicist at MGM told Hamilton that the Colonel was the one man who could steer him through the Hollywood labyrinth), it was a personal connection that would come to mean as much to him as any other friendship in his life. (Some years later, Colonel would serve as best man at his wedding.)
With George Hamilton, fall 1963. Courtesy of the Graceland Archives
It was clear from the start that Colonel liked Hamilton, but he couldn’t really give him any advice, he said, because that would mean taking away from his managerial obligations to Elvis. (Hamilton was never sure whether he meant time or money, or neither.) But he could offer the young man an opportunity. He had a thousand little papier-mâché elephants, and all Hamilton had to do was to pay him $1,000 for the elephants and they would have a deal. Hamilton scratched his head—it was going to be hard for him to come up with $1,000, and he couldn’t understand how this was going to work to his advantage—but he made the deal, and when he came back to Colonel after selling all the elephants, it was perfectly evident that he had passed the test.
It was Colonel who got him the lead in MGM’s Your Cheatin’ Heart, the life story of country music legend Hank Williams, a couple of years later, and, although he turned elsewhere in Hollywood trying to understand this business he had entered without plan or preparation (George Hamilton, as anyone who knows his work will surely be aware, is nothing if not a man-about-town), it was Colonel alone who gave him useful information, knowledgeable insights, and irrefutably wise counsel. As Hamilton saw it, “The Colonel always had a joke and a punch line which kind of framed him up,” but once you proved yourself to him, Colonel never doubted your intentions, though he might very well question your judgment.
