The Colonel and the King, page 5
The cookhouse was the center of the carny world. Not only were you always guaranteed a good, nourishing meal, it provided a refuge and a gathering place after the midway had closed, a place not just for conversation but for all-night craps games in which carnival “scrip” was exchanged until payday arrived. Tommy Parker cherished every aspect of the experience; he had never enjoyed a greater opportunity for sharp-witted conversation, or a stronger sense of community, without ever being asked where he was from, or where he was going. The outside world was not so much the “enemy” as a necessary accessory to their own. And if the customers they called “rubes” occasionally felt they had been fleeced, the show folk rested easy in the same belief that underlay P. T. Barnum’s philosophy and was soon to be immortalized by the vaudeville comedian and movie star W. C. Fields, “You can’t cheat an honest man.”
These were the people whom he would hold dear all his life. He would never cease to identify himself as a carny, and he ascribed nearly every one of the accomplishments of his fabled show-business career as something he had “learned from the carnies.” And he never doubted for a moment that for all his awkwardness and unease, they appreciated him for who he was, a shy, oddly delicate, but enormously eager young man with new skills that revealed themselves every day and a desperate hunger for acceptance.
THE FOLLOWING year he went out with the Sells-Floto Circus, which had at one time featured Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and would eventually be absorbed by the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. But while it was the realization of yet another childhood dream, perhaps because circus life was more regimented than the freewheeling life of the carnival, perhaps because once again he was starting at the bottom, he didn’t find it as satisfying as the Johnny Jones Exposition, and in 1936 he was back with the carnival again. Only this time he was not alone.
He had met a young woman the previous year while she was working at the Hav-A-Tampa cigar stand set up by Royal American Shows on the grounds of the Florida State Fair. Marie Mott was twenty-six, just a year older than him, pretty, petite, outgoing in a way that almost immediately drew his attention. She lived with her mother and father and sixteen-year-old brother, Bitsy, along with her little boy by her first husband (she was just getting divorced from her second). She was bubbly, and she could be sharp-tongued at times, but for the first time in his life he was smitten. When her job at the Fairgrounds ended (she was, officially, dubbed “Miss [Cigar] Club” of Tampa), she started working at a coffee shop, and her new suitor fell into the habit of dropping by every afternoon for coffee.
When he came back from his season with Sells-Floto in the fall of 1935, they took up again as if they had never stopped, and he shared with her some of the secret dreams and ambitions that he had already begun to put into motion. On his own he had started to offer pony rides (he got the ponies from his showman friends) and set up a miniature animal show that included Dixie the pony, her colt Tiny, his dog Queenie, and a monkey called Peanuts. With this menagerie he did a special promotion at the Franklin Theatre for the opening of Home on the Range, starring Jackie Coogan and Randolph Scott, and there is a picture of him, erect and thin, with his hat tilted at a rakish angle, and Dixie, Tiny, and Queenie arrayed on the straw he had laid in a corner of the theater lobby. He also began a longtime practice of playing Santa Claus at the Maas Brothers department store, just down the street from the movie theater, where he not only embraced the role, he “shilled” for Santa, going out “on the streets around the store,” as Dirk Vellenga wrote, “luring children and their probably less than willing parents into the department store’s ‘Toyland.’”
The two of them, Marie and Tom, went out together with Royal American Shows the following spring, leaving Marie’s eleven-year-old son, Bobby, with her parents, and working both together and separately on the show. Royal American, which boasted the world’s largest midway and the world’s longest train (not to mention, according to Vellenga, “fifty-two rides, more than a thousand [employees]… and enough electricity-generating equipment to light a city of forty thousand”), was at this point the undisputed king of the carnival world, and it would have been a thrill for Tommy Parker just to be there, let alone to be accompanied by his girl, who already knew many of the show folk from her own past associations. Marie sold tickets on the midway and worked the candy-apple stand, and everyone called her Mrs. Parker, even though they knew the two lovebirds were not yet married.
Man about town, Tampa, ca. mid-1930s. Courtesy of the Graceland Archives
They returned to Tampa when the season was over and moved in with Marie’s parents. Marie went back to work as a waitress, while Tom added steadily to his assortment of independent promotions. It was a challenge sometimes to find the money to pay for the placards and handbills he needed to generate business, but he struck up what would become a lifelong friendship with the printer he found to do the work. The first time he visited Rinaldi Printing on Howard Avenue, just north of Fig Street, he had just two dollars in his pocket, and the bill was going to come to ten, but the proprietor, Henry Rinaldi, looked the young man in the eye, assessed his character at a glance, and agreed to “carry” him for regular payments of one or two dollars a week.
Tom had never met anyone like Mr. Rinaldi before. In his late fifties, quiet, dignified, and a noted amateur historian, he had started the press in 1905 to publish his own books, one of which became the standard guide to South Florida until the Depression killed off the Florida land boom in the early 1930s. Rinaldi Printing was a well-established pillar of the city, but like every other business was affected by the hard times. Rather than let any of his workers go, Mr. Rinaldi started cooking lunch for them, and soon Tom, too, started showing up for lunch at his invitation. It was not a question of mooching, it was more a matter of learning, as Mr. Rinaldi dedicated himself to teaching the young man how to set up a business and offered thoughts and advice about how to deal with the public in a firm but kindly way. Before long Tom established a close friendship with Henry’s twenty-two-year-old son, Clyde, who was just about to graduate from college. Father and son were equally taken with this lively young man so full of enthusiasm and ideas, so avid for knowledge about a world he had yet to fully experience or comprehend.
Tom and Marie went out again with Royal American the following year, but this time they took her son, who had the time of his life and acted as a kind of shill for a “Free Ham” giveaway (a free raffle ticket, that is, with the purchase of at least one Royal American ride), as he wandered the midway with a big ham on his shoulder, exclaiming, “Look what I won.” Tom and Marie took charge of the pie car, too, that year, which was, in biographer Alanna Nash’s description, “a kind of rolling casino with slot machines and games of chance for show people only.” Tom not only presided over its official food-serving function, he almost invariably got caught up in the games of chance in which sometimes considerable amounts of “scrip” were wagered, and frequently lost, till the early hours of the morning.
But the high point of all his promotions was a gimmick he called “Wedding on the Wheel,” which began with his going to the local courthouse to collect the names of every couple who had recently applied for a marriage license. Then, after a little bit of research, he would choose one of the lucky couples to be wed on the Ferris wheel. He had little trouble obtaining the wedding dress from “the best ladies’ clothing store” in town by stressing to the owner how much business the free publicity would generate. Then he would promote the groom’s suit in similar fashion, sometimes even managing a suit for the best man as well, plus “a wedding cake, bridal bouquet, groceries for the couple to start out married life, and [if he was lucky] even the bridal suite at the town’s best hotel.” That way, he loved to explain to latter-day listeners, all of the town’s leading businesses had a stake in the carnival’s success and would highlight Royal American in all their advertising, while the wedding party (always a big wedding party if his research was correct) would all attend and then pay to enjoy every ride and game on the midway. And there was never a single person in attendance who did not have a good time.
By now, with all this experience under his belt, he felt ready for bigger things, and so when the head advance man for Royal American quit, or was fired, in the middle of the 1937 season, Tom Parker confidently applied for the job.
He was turned down.
Various reasons were offered. Despite the success of Wedding on the Wheel, which everyone agreed had been slickly prepared and presented, he still was not ready. He might make a good junior advance man, he was told, but his ungrammatical speech and uncouth manner were simply not refined enough to deal with all the unexpected pitfalls that were bound to arise or, for that matter, all the local bigwigs that someone like Peasy Hoffman could so easily smooth over. He was told to wait, his time would come, he just needed a little more… polish.
But none of it made any sense to him, and he went ahead and got drunk, which he almost never did, starting with beer in the cookhouse, as he complained vociferously to his fellow workers, who just seemed to egg him on. As the evening progressed, he grew increasingly loud, and increasingly belligerent, until finally he marched right up to his boss and issued an ultimatum. Royal American at this point had a choice: either give him the job he deserved, or he quit. The result was a foregone conclusion.
Marie packed up, weeping and hurling recriminations at her “husband,” who had shown such poor judgment in staking out a position from which he was too stubborn to retreat. And when he sobered up, he couldn’t help but agree. He blamed no one but himself. It was the same mistake he had made in his hoboing days. He had become too self-confident, he had let down his guard. And he made a promise to himself there and then that he would never again drink alcohol to the point that it could impair his judgment in this manner. And, short of splitting a beer from time to time with one or another of Elvis’ guys, he never did.
THEY RETURNED bedraggled to Tampa, where they once again took up residence at Marie’s parents’ house. As usual, Marie’s mother and father moved out of their own bedroom to make room for the young couple, but they were delighted, as always, with the presents and souvenirs Tom and Marie had brought home from their travels. Marie went back to work as a waitress and Tom started up once again with all his various promotional gimmicks, renewing his ties with different movie theaters, expanding his animal shows and pony rides, and coming up with a “sleep endurance” contest at a local furniture store.
At some point, in a story he always loved to tell without, it seemed, too much regard for literal detail, he came across an elephant whose owner had suffered financial reverses and couldn’t afford the substantial monthly feed bill. The way he told it, the poor animal was practically starving to death, so he took the elephant off its owner’s hands, arranged with a local feed store to sponsor it in exchange for free sandwich-board advertising, and then found several other businesses in town that felt they, too, could benefit from similar publicity. And so, both he and the elephant thrived.
He was Santa Claus once again at Christmastime—it was a role he loved to play—but at the same time he could also be that spiffy young man in the double-breasted suit with a pocket square and white shoes taking part in the New Year’s Eve celebration at the Park Theatre. In this role he convincingly played the freewheeling Rotarian, with the same bright faith in the nation’s future as any other up-and-coming young businessman.
The following year he and Marie were both back out on the carnival circuit, only it was with L. J. Heth Shows this time, and this time he got the kind of job, as press agent and promoter, for which he had yearned for so long. It should have been a dream come true. It challenged all of his creative thinking, his tireless work ethic, and his staunch determination to maintain a positive approach at all times. He got a dog named Teddy and taught him to smile and do a few other tricks, and Teddy, who would be with him for a number of years, became part of the act. At one point in the season, they fell on hard times, and the carnival owner told him he thought they would need to lower the price of admission. No, Tom said without hesitation, he thought they should double the price of admission. And when the owner balked, or thought that he must have misheard him, Tom explained cheerfully that with the new price they could afford to offer a half-price refund to anyone who complained that they were not satisfied with the show. But hardly anyone ever did.
If this season of being-in-charge fulfilled many of his long-standing ambitions, for reasons that he was never able to fully articulate, or perhaps even understand, it turned out to be strangely unsatisfying. Marie’s thoughts seemed more and more focused on settling down. They had both registered for Social Security the previous year, giving their residence as her parents’ home, his employer as the Park Theatre. He was Thomas Andrew Parker, American-born in Huntington, West Virginia, on June 26, 1909, of equally native-born parents. And he signed the form in his customarily confident style.
Marie learned to cook all his favorite dishes, and while she could be confounded sometimes by his exacting standards, by what seemed like almost a fetish for cleanliness and personal hygiene, she was happy to settle into a domestic routine that might very well have led the rest of the world to think of them as just another happily married young couple. But whether she chose to acknowledge it or not (she did acknowledge her irritation that for whatever reason he refused to commit himself to the formal bonds of marriage), she couldn’t altogether ignore that this was not the limit of her husband’s dreams or aspirations. Those he confided to no one—he might even, she suspected, have had difficulty articulating them to himself.
They stayed busy. Marie had gotten a job playing piano at a music store, she was still with the Cigar Association, and she continued to waitress, too. As for Tom, he always found plenty to do. Everyone knew he was a hard worker, and one of the carnivals could always use his skills for several weeks at a time. He kept adding on to his portfolio of promotions and gratefully accepted advice from Henry Rinaldi not so much on how to conduct his business as how to make new connections by promoting himself. But mainly he appeared to be marking time. He seemed to feel, he carried himself in some indefinable way, as if he believed he was meant for better things.
FIVE
My Blue Heaven
GENE AUSTIN was one of the first pop superstars. Bigger than Al Jolson for a time, bigger than Rudy Vallee; between 1925 and 1929, he had nine number-one hits, including such standards as “Yes Sir! That’s My Baby,” “Bye Bye Blackbird,” and “Carolina Moon,” and his 1927 recording of “My Blue Heaven,” a rock ’n’ roll staple for Fats Domino in the ’50s, sold more copies (an estimated five million) than any single record until Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas.” He was, by all accounts, a great entertainer, with the ability to command any stage, but it was his relaxed, easygoing style that proved his most enduring legacy, influencing Bing Crosby profoundly and all those who would subsequently adopt Crosby’s studiedly laid-back approach. All this was accomplished, he explained to his “nephew” (actually more like a third cousin) and protégé, Tommy Overstreet, a latter-day country star in his own right, by utilizing the microphone with an intimacy that previous recording techniques had not permitted. “What’s the most important instrument when you’re singing?” he demanded of his nephew. “Think about it. What’s the most important instrument for you as a singer? You’ve got to learn how to hold that microphone and caress it and sing to it, so you can get the emotion through to the people. If you don’t do that, everything else is whistling Dixie.”
He was acknowledged by both Gene Autry and Jimmie Rodgers (the “Father of Country Music”) as one of their greatest musical influences, and he provided each with personal and professional guidance. He formed a close connection with Fats Waller, too, the pioneering stride pianist and entertainer supreme, whose “Ain’t Misbehavin’” he was among the first to record, with Waller accompanying him on piano over the objections of his otherwise all-white backing group. And while he sang for the most part in the kind of flutey falsetto favored by romantic crooners of the day, he insisted proudly that his was a falsetto with “balls.” Which was a measure of both the delicacy and the forcefulness of his art.
By January of 1939, however, when he arrived in Tampa, Gene Austin had suffered a number of significant reverses. With the 1929 stock market crash, the bottom had fallen out of the recording business, and while he would continue to be a popular live attraction, accompanied by his own jaunty piano and the bass-and-guitar duo of Candy (Jonathan Joseph Candido) and Coco (Otto Heimel), who would soon become almost as well-known for their comedy bits as their virtuosic musical contributions, he never regained his popularity on the record charts. He did become something of a radio star, though, and he found work in the movies, too, in a succession of lively cameos, while enjoying intermittent success and failure in the cabaret business, rapidly acquiring, then just as quickly losing, ownership of various supper clubs and nightspots in a number of different cities. He remained, by his own description, a happy-go-lucky kind of guy, an unfailing optimist, who, far from saving his money, had, by his own admission, done everything he could to throw it away, placing his faith in a succession of people and opportunities that never quite came through.
