The Colonel (13 page)

“I believe they were in love, plain and simple,” says Sandra Polk Ross. “He was a fine cut of a man in those early pictures. And she was such a handsome woman and so trim.
Marie was a hot number when she was young, and he had her on a pedestal.”

Whether or not Tom and Marie enjoyed a vigorous sex life, after years of struggling on his own, Parker needed a woman to take care of him. At his lowest point—when the Velares and
Sedylmayr continually turned him down—he craved the reassuring words that might have come from Maria van Kuijk, who always comforted him after confrontations with his father.

Marie, whose name so resembled his mother’s, and who was older than he and more seasoned in various ways of the world, was a perfect choice for a surrogate mother and lover. And she had
one more irresistible quality: Marie Mott was an exceptional cook, specializing in the heavy Southern fare that Parker had become accustomed to in his travels. Surprisingly, he let Marie all but
rule him.

“I think he loved her as much as he could love any woman,” says Byron Raphael. “But later on, when I knew him, I got the distinct impression that he might not have liked women
sexually. In fact, I was certain that the Colonel was asexual. He couldn’t relate to a soft, romantic woman, but he could somehow relate to this bossy kind of lady. She had a coarse, dominant
quality about her, and that apparently attracted him.”

To Marie, an uneducated woman with a child to support in the heart of the Depression, any man who took a genuine interest in her must have seemed like a lifeline on the open sea. And with
Marie’s appetite for adventure, Parker would have seemed an appealing companion for a life that broke with conventional tastes, regular work hours, and confinement to a single location. In
short, they made a good team.

And so they married, as Parker would tell the Associated Press, “in 1932, while wintering with a carnival in Tampa.”

Or did they? As usual with the saga of Tom Parker, the most mundane of facts often prove to be illusions. Parker was still in the service in 1932, stationed at Fort Barrancas. Certainly he might
have married Marie during a furlough, or in his months of desertion from the army. But the
Florida Office of Vital Statistics, checking the years of 1927 to 1946, finds no
record of marriage between the two.

Bitsy Mott says his sister and Parker married in Alabama in 1935, a date Parker has also cited. But Mott doesn’t remember the ceremony (“I guess they went to a justice of the peace
or a judge, and a party was too much money”), and documents prove that Marie was not divorced from Willett Sayre until 1936. There is no marriage license on file for them in any state in
which they lived or visited for any length of time.

Parker was inordinately skittish of legal documents throughout his life, fearing, perhaps, that they might lead to a discovery of his alien status. For that reason, the couple may not have
officially tied the knot.

But both Byron Raphael and Gabe Tucker feel certain that Marie and Tom were legally married, since Parker was adamantly opposed to couples living together out of wedlock, a view that may have
harkened to his parents’ forced marriage.

The best guess, then, is that the Parkers simply laid their hands on the - Showmen’s League Bible, said a few somber words, and entered into a “carny wedding.”

Whatever their situation, the two soon grew inseparable, and Marie proved an asset on the carnival, putting her natural good looks to advantage as a bally girl on the various revues, or
“gal shows.” There, she would wear a skimpy costume—little more than Egyptian veils and a few strategic beads and feathers—and sway provocatively to the music.

Often, Parker would be the talker on these shows, and Marie, as one of the line girls out front, would catch the eye of the yokels who gathered round the platform and excite them to lay down
their money to go inside. But once beyond the bally platform, the pretty girls disappeared, leaving the less attractive girls to strip for the customers. In between shows, Marie helped Parker
deliver the apples to Mrs. Velare, and worked as a short-order cook in several food concessions he operated on the midway.

Perhaps the most famous tale from the Parker carnival lore is the foot-long hot dog scam, which dates from this time. In this story, Parker found his niche in the shadow world of the carnival
advertising foot-long hot dogs, which had just made a hit at the Chicago World’s Fair. What the customer got, however, was an appropriate size bun with a smidgen of frankfurter tucked in each
end and a middle generously filled with slaw and onions. Whenever a sucker wised up to the gyp and returned demanding his money, Parker, who presumably ate the middles himself,
feigned surprise and pointed to a hunk of meat carefully arranged on the ground in front of the booth. “You just dropped your meat, son,” he said calmly. “Now move
along.”

Such a stunt, worthy of the best W. C. Fields routine, is merely myth, say Parker’s cronies. But Bobby Ross always swore it was true, adding that the Parkers also manned a hamburger booth
where the meat was so stretched with sandwich loaf and food coloring that “by morning, you could have sold those burgers for pancakes, there was so much bread in them. They were basically
bread on a bun.”

By the time Bobby was twelve, he spent his summers working on the carnivals with Tom and Marie, mostly as a shill. The Parkers advertised a daily “free” drawing for a ham with
purchase of one concession item, but the pork only served as a prop before landing on the Parkers’ own table. Each afternoon, Tom slapped a big ham on Bobby’s shoulder and had him walk
the fairgrounds like an excited schoolboy. “Look what I won!” the child would cry. “If
I
can win a ham, anybody can!”

Soon Bobby would leave Granny Mott and travel with Tom and Marie full-time. Parker, only sixteen years older than the boy, treated him as a combination of son and friend, especially as Bobby
grew older. He looked after him on the carnival and tried to steer him away from the heavy grift and gambling, warning that a gambler’s dollar was greased. For that reason, Parker kept Bobby
out of the pie car when he and Marie took it over as a privileged concession. The dining car on the show train, the pie car was also a kind of rolling casino, with slot machines and games of chance
for show people only. It was here, and in the after-hours gambling tents, or “G-tops,” that the carnivals carried for their private use, that Tom Parker indulged his new fascination
with gambling, which would grow into an obsession throughout his life.

For a while, with Jack Kaplan’s help, Parker found a solid bit of luck promoting Coca-Cola throughout Florida. But when that job played out, he was back to taxing his
imagination—booking magic shows and even staging a pie-eating contest by advertising the chance to go up against the fattest man on earth, a sideshow performer hired out from Johnny J.
Jones’s Congress of Fat People. The carnival had taught Parker the importance of “now” money—getting it square in your hand at the time of the deal, even up front, if
possible.

Occasionally, he still hooked up with Peasy Hoffman to sell ads. But the notion of making an honest dollar through the regular channels of advertising and sales didn’t deliver the zing
that Parker got from artfully
adding a bit of humbug to his whirl of fast promises. He was particularly proud of the time he talked the owner of a funeral home into letting
him bury a human being alive, drilling peepholes in the earth so the curious and macabre could talk to the man—the unfailingly cheerful Kaplan—who said he’d never been more
comfortable than he was at that moment in a “breathable” straw casket.

Just to what extent Parker had become a perpetually scheming promotion machine shows up in the way he turned Franklin Street, the main drag and shopping hub of downtown Tampa, into a virtual
carnival lot—selling the staid Jewish proprietors of a furniture store, for example, on a public sleep endurance contest, promising they would keep a throng of people at their display
window.

At Maas Brothers downtown department store, which was the biggest and most elegant store in town—recognized as an emporium of good taste—Parker cultivated the friendship of Isaac and
Abe Maas. There he hired on as Santa Claus for the Christmas shows, standing out on Franklin Street in the fluffy red-and-white suit, enticing the children of - Tampa’s well-heeled citizens
upstairs into Toyland. He also convinced the Maas brothers that running pony rides in front of their Franklin Street store would add immeasurably to their business.

Working a deal with Bert Slover to “borrow” four carnival ponies and a small track, Parker then ambled into Rinaldi Printing Company on - Tampa’s Howard Street and asked about
having tickets made on credit. For the loan of $5 during the Depression, Parker would reward Clyde Rinaldi in the 1960s by insisting that RCA use the small Tampa firm for much of the massive Elvis
printing.

“He made Mr. Rinaldi rich,” says Gabe Tucker. But Parker also forged an intimacy with him that he extended to few: Clyde Rinaldi was among the handful of people Parker told about his
Dutch origins. The men remained close until Rinaldi’s death in 1988.

Meeting Clyde Rinaldi was one of the rare breaks Parker got in the off-season months of the 1930s, which marked the bleakest period of an already desolate existence. Marie struggled to feed the
three of them on fifty cents a day and woke up many mornings wondering how she would do it. On March 6, 1937, both she and Tom registered for Social Security and were assigned numbers just one
digit apart. Parker’s original application, which he filled out in ornate, European handwriting, marks the first official appearance of the middle name Andrew. He wrote that his present
employer was Park Theatre, a popular movie house located at 448
West Lafayette Street. His birthplace, he claimed, was Huntington, West Virginia. And in listing his parents,
he gave life to two people who never existed, Edward Frank Parker and Mary Ida Ponsy (sic). He signed the form at the bottom with great, self-assured flourish.

In the fall of 1937, Parker suggested to Marie that they send Bobby back to Granny Mott for a time and travel the country. They would hobo when they had to and stay with carny friends when they
could. Somewhere along the way, they would find a warm hearth, a bountiful table, and the smile of good fortune.

Instead, Parker told his brother Ad three decades later, he found a country more paralyzed by economic hardship than he had imagined. For months on end, he and Marie lived on a dollar a week and
often slept in horse stables. In the great Southwest, they took shelter on Indian reservations, where Parker, “the big, wise white man,” told fortunes to the natives and sold sparrows
he painted yellow and passed off as canaries.

During such difficult times, Parker told his brother, he often thought of the family back in Holland. Yet he still stayed silent. “I didn’t want you all to know what I was
doing,” he admitted. “In fact, usually I couldn’t afford the writing paper or stamps.”

When the couple returned to Florida, they moved in with the Motts, but Parker never treated his in-laws to a story about his mysterious past, not even when he sometimes spoke in a foreign
language that Bitsy mistook for Yiddish.

By now, Parker’s desperation led him to draw a thinner line between outright corruption and the petty larceny of the carnival. In a scam that was vaguely reminiscent of his grandfather
Ponsie—and that would later serve as the basis for Joe David Brown’s novel
Addie Pray,
adapted for the 1973 motion picture
Paper Moon
—Parker traveled the
neighboring states posing as a Bible salesman.

“He would go into a town and read the obituaries and then have the names embossed on a box of Bibles that he got in other cities by doing work for churches,” Byron Raphael remembers
him saying. “He always chose men’s names, because he figured the widows were soft touches. He’d walk up and ring their doorbells, ask for the husband by name, and then pretend he
didn’t know he had died. And then he’d say, ‘That’s such a shame, because he’d ordered this Bible and paid five dollars on it.’ ”

More often than not, the grieving widow, struck by her late husband’s devotion to the Lord and his eerie premonition of death, gladly forked over the balance owed as a last fulfillment of
his wishes. But if she didn’t,
Parker would sometimes be “visited” by the voice of the dearly departed (“Is that my Helen there?”). A guy had to
be careful, though, and save that gimmick as a last resort. “He had no conscience,” says Raphael. “He thought it was funny.”

Both Tom and Marie continued to dupe the unsuspecting in bolder and more blatant ways as hard times wore on. As with the Bible scam, Parker would brag about his survival methods in years to
come. In the 1960s, he showed Gabe Tucker how he would walk through a marketplace and eat enough produce on the spot to make a meal. Likewise, Marie would pilfer, or “cloat” in carny
language, a bag of flour from the concessions stands to carry them through.

But Marie would not be able to stop with a mere bag of flour.

“The truth is, Marie was a kleptomaniac all of her life,” says her daughter-in-law Sandra Polk Ross. “I’m not sure when it started, but she was good at it—whatever
she could palm or pocket. When I first met Bob, and Marie would say she wanted to go shopping, Bob would tell me to take her and keep an eye on her, and pay for whatever she took, and Colonel would
reimburse me.”

In the carnival years, the showman who had spent his life treading the line between deals and ideals found it increasingly difficult to tell the difference in the kind of cleverness and deceit
born of need and the shameful violation of others.

During the late 1950s, in his early Hollywood days with Presley, Parker stunned the old-guard studio heads when he suggested how they could really make money on their pictures: charge the
audience $1.50 to get in and another $3 to get out. It was exactly what he had done in the carnival when he staged a tent show in a cow pasture, far away from the midway, and designated one flap as
the only exit. Once outside the tent, the furious patrons had a choice of walking a quarter of a mile through a field covered in cow manure or renting one of Parker’s ponies to carry them
through. Parker, like most of the carnies of the era, saw nothing reprehensible about it.