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The Colonel: The Extraordinary Story of Colonel Tom Parker and Elvis Presley - Softcover

Nash, Alanna

 
9781451613575: The Colonel: The Extraordinary Story of Colonel Tom Parker and Elvis Presley
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1451613571 ISBN 13: 9781451613575
Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

The legendary relationship at the heart of a major motion picture.

In The Colonel, Alanna Nash, the author of Golden Girl: The Story of Jessica Savitch, explores in depth the amazing story of Colonel Tom Parker, the man behind the legend and the myth of Elvis Presley. The result is a book that reads like the most riveting of real-life detective stories—one that will completely change your view of Presley's life, success, and death.

While scores of books have been written about Elvis Presley, this is the first meticulously researched biography of Tom Parker written by someone who knew him personally. And for anyone truly interested in the performer many consider the greatest and most influential of the twentieth century, it is impossible to understand how Elvis came to be such a phenomenon without examining the life and mind of Parker, the man who virtually controlled Elvis's every move.

Alanna Nash has been covering the story of Elvis Presley and Colonel Tom Parker since the day of Presley's funeral in Memphis, Tennessee. She was the first journalist allowed to view Presley's body, a compelling and surprising sight. But the profile of Parker attending the funeral in a Hawaiian shirt and a baseball cap was even stranger, and led her to investigate the man behind the myth.

It has been known for twenty years that Thomas Andrew Parker was, in fact, born in Holland as Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk. But Nash has dug much deeper and, in a masterpiece of reporting, unearthed never-before-seen documents, including Parker's army records and psychiatric evaluations, and the original police report of an unsolved murder case in Holland that lies at the heart of the Parker mystery. In the process of weighing the evidence, she answers the biggest riddle in the history of the music industry, as it becomes clear that every move Parker made in the handling of Elvis Presley -- from why he never allowed Elvis to perform in Europe, to why he didn't halt Elvis's drug use, to why he put him in so many mediocre movies, and even the Colonel's direction of Presley's army career -- was designed to protect Parker's own secrets.

Filled with startling new material, her book challenges even the most familiar precepts of the Presley saga -- everything we presumed about Parker's handling of the world's most famous entertainer must now be reevaluated in the light of information Nash reveals about Parker, who cared little for Presley beyond what the singer could do to bolster the Colonel's precarious position as an illegal alien.
Elvis Presley, as one of Parker's unwitting victims, paid a major price for the Colonel's past and his overwhelming need to be more important than his client. As a result, Presley was never allowed to reach his potential and died in drug-induced frustration over his stunted and mismanaged career.

In this astonishing, impeccably written, and vastly entertaining book, Nash proves that the only figure in American popular culture as fascinating as Elvis Presley is Colonel Tom Parker, the man who shaped Elvis, who in turn helped shape us.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

A feature writer for Entertainment Weekly, USA Weekend, and The New York Times, Alanna Nash is a longtime chronicler of popular culture. She is the author of five books, including Elvis Aaron Presley: Revelations from the Memphis Mafia and Golden Girl: The Story of Jessica Savitch, which was the basis for the feature film Up Close and Personal. Named one of the "Heavy 100 of Country Music" by Esquire magazine, Nash holds a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She was the Society of Professional Journalists' National Member of the Year in 1994.

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Introduction

"Did you see it?" the old man asked, shifting his mountainous heap of flesh to the edge of the chair, his eyes open wide and twinkling. "What a hell of a thing! Unbelievable!"

It was June 18, 1994, the day after O. J. Simpson's infamous Bronco run, and Colonel Tom Parker, with his attentive wife, Loanne, at his side, held court for two visitors at the N'Orleans Restaurant, a meat 'n' two joint in a run-of-the-mill strip mall named Lucky's on the outskirts of the gambling capital of the world.

Like the rest of the country, Parker had been mesmerized by Simpson's bizarre highway chase. But now his reaction, with his face momentarily frozen in awe, spoke silently of something else -- not of a fascination with sports or the subtleties of race relations, but of a sort of perverse pride, perhaps, in an elite and remarkable fraternity of rogues. Or at the very least, in a man who had taken a terrible risk, and managed to beat the odds.

This was my second of three visits with Parker, whose own survivor instincts so defied description that many thought him indestructible. Yet less than three years later, also in Vegas, far from his birthplace of Breda, Holland, where he first learned the art of the hustle as an errand boy in Dutch fairs, circuses, and carnivals, he succumbed to the complications of a stroke at the age of eighty-seven.

A master illusionist in business and in the business of life, Tom Parker made things appear and disappear at will, and created something very great out of nothing -- including himself. Out of respect for that, if nothing else, I went back to say good-bye.

··

The giant marquee outside the Las Vegas Hilton was both sweet and succinct (FAREWELL, COLONEL PARKER), but not everybody knew what it meant.

"You here to gamble?" asked my taxi driver, who had shuttled me in from the airport on a late January day in 1997 and who had uttered not a word until tip time.

"No, I'm going to the memorial service for Colonel Parker."

A beat. "Dat the fried chicken guy?"

At least one cynical obituary writer, Serene Dominic, seconded that thought in a Phoenix New Times article headed "Cooked the Colonel's Way -- Colonel Tom Parker Has Kicked the Bucket, and the Original Recipe for Rock 'n' Roll Rotisserie Goes with Him." But the 160 mourners who filtered into Ballroom D saw him as one of the last giants and true iconoclasts of the century -- a penniless immigrant who slipped into the country, befriended U.S. presidents and corporate CEOs, created both an icon and a $4-billion business, and never let any of it get in the way of what mattered most -- playing the game.

Through it all, he remained as individualistic, as shrewd, rude, crude, and fun-loving as ever. At his death, he still delighted in practicing what he called the art of "snowing," the exquisitely performed act of separating people from their money, leaving them with a smile on their face and melting away before they realized what had taken place.

While some would argue that Parker's very body was a temple to gluttony, greed, and feeding off the dimmer wits of others, it was the Snowman his friends had come to honor this day, his widow, Loanne, posing an intriguing question.

"I want to leave you with just one thought," she said, addressing the crowd, which had passed a lobby-card-size photo of the couple at the entrance. "If Thomas A. Parker had never existed, how would each of your lives be different today?"

One person who couldn't answer that question was Elvis Aaron Presley, whose piped-in versions of "Memories" and "How Great Thou Art" opened and closed the service with ghostly reverence. The Elvis Presley who had first come to Vegas in 1956 as an acne-faced adolescent left it twenty years later as a pathetic, corseted cartoon, his body blown from years of abuse, his spirit picked hollow.

For all of the twenty years that Parker outlasted his greatest discovery, he would also have to live with the allegations that he had destroyed him, stifling his artistry in third-rate Hollywood formula pictures, suffocating his ambition in 837 Vegas performances from 1969 to 1976, and killing his will to live by refusing to challenge him in meaningful ways -- a European tour, a dramatic film role to reclaim his self-respect, a crack at a memorable song.

Whether regarded as a meretricious and evil confidence man, or as a brilliant marketer and strategist, as remarkable as the star he managed, no figure in all of entertainment is more controversial, colorful, or larger than life than Tom Parker. "He was so immense, so gigantic in his way," remembers writer Robert Kotlowitz, an RCA publicist in the late '50s and early '60s. "His style was equivalent to a great politician's, with so much flamboyance and wit and, underneath it all, cunning. He had to beat the whole world."

Yet at his death, Parker was blasted by rock critic Dave Marsh as "the most overrated person in the history of show business," and assessed by Dutch journalist and filmmaker Constant Meijers as "a nobody who needed a somebody to be anybody." To this day, a favorite debate question among pop music journalists is whether Elvis, whom the Colonel often referred to in carnival terms as "my attraction," would have remained a regional act without Parker's guidance, or if the young performer was such a blazing comet that no one could have stopped his streak across the sky.

The probability is that neither man would have been as big in his field without the other, Parker realizing, like P. T. Barnum, that the promotion of a curiosity was just as important as the curiosity itself. A chameleon who was many things to many people, Parker has his staunch defenders -- as a visionary, a businessman, and a friend, even by those who got up from the losing side of the bargaining table. And while Parker probably would have referred to himself as a promoter more than anything else, having marketed the icon most recognizable in all the world after Coca-Cola, Chet Atkins, who dealt with many of the biggest artists during his tenure as an RCA Records executive, pronounced Parker "the best manager I ever saw....Whatever he cost Elvis, he was worth it, because Elvis would've...lost that luster in no time if it hadn't been for the Colonel."

Mike Crowley, who traveled with Parker in the concert years of the '70s and is now a talent manager himself, speaks, like many, of Parker's loyalty, and also justifies his treatment of Elvis, the addict. "Nobody killed Elvis except Elvis, and nobody could have helped Elvis but Elvis. The only other thing he could have done was walk away."

Parker himself never bothered to address his critics, nor did he try to carve out much middle ground in the debate of whether he was the devil or angel in Elvis's own private hell. When pressed about his handling or mishandling of Elvis, he'd merely bristle, stamp his cane into the ground, and repeat his stock answer: "I sleep good at night."

Beyond that, the old Dutchman who understood America far better than most Americans simply threw out the line he'd used for decades to keep himself out of headlines ("Elvis is my only client and my life, so I never give out stories about myself"), allegedly because he was writing a memoir to be called How Much Does It Cost If It's Free? But it was an excuse he had concocted to keep others from looking too closely at the hocus-pocus of his life, and from having to explain himself, especially in light of a 1980 lawsuit in which the state of Tennessee accused him of "overreaching" in his fiduciary responsibilities to Presley.

If Elvis was unknowable by his manager's design, the Colonel was beyond knowing, even to his own family. In 1980, Parker's brother-in-law, Bitsy Mott, who spent many years on the road in the Colonel's employ, was asked to explain...

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Verlag
Simon & Schuster
Erscheinungsdatum
2010
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1451613571
ISBN 13 
9781451613575
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
448
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Van Ditmar Boeken, VDB Sales
sales@vanditmar.nl

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