The Colonel (19 page)

By the time Parker assumed Arnold’s management, the Tennessee Plowboy, who would become one of the most prolific hit-making artists of all time, had made his first indelible mark with
“Each Minute Seems a Million Years.” The song rose to the number five spot in
Billboard
’s tabulation of best-selling “folk” music.

To move beyond any initial blush of success, however, Eddy needed an energetic team working in tandem. While Steve Sholes, the heavy-set and avuncular head of RCA Records’ country and
R&B divisions, was already in place, Tom Parker would head that team and rely on it for his own advancement in the industry. Eventually he would bring all the players to the group that would
later figure so heavily in taking Elvis to the top, most prominently Hill and Range music publishers Jean and Julian Aberbach, and Harry Kalcheim and Abe Lastfogel of the powerful William Morris
Agency. Nearly every major career move he guided for Arnold—a string of chart-topping records, the judicious use of early television, a foray into Hollywood movies, and even engagements in
Las Vegas—served as the blueprint for Parker’s plan with Elvis.

From the instant he took over Arnold’s career, Parker began building momentum, not just for Arnold, but for himself. In what would serve as his lifelong pattern of artist and record
company relations, he kept his client as isolated from the record label as possible. By appearing to make himself indispensable to both parties, he hoped to increase his importance and clout, while
manipulating his client’s knowledge of the intricacies of the deals.

Above all, it was imperative that the record label executives—and others in the trade—see Parker as a figure of equal or greater stature to his artist. In magazine and newspaper
advertisements he coupled his name with that of Eddy’s—
UNDER EXCLUSIVE MANAGEMENT OF THOMAS A
.
PARKER
—in letters nearly the same
size as those employed for Arnold’s. The idea was to convey not only Parker’s insistence that they were a team, but that Parker was a deal maker worthy of celebration and reward.
Already he was having large studio portraits taken of himself, in which he smiled broadly from within the proud confines of an expensive pinstripe suit. He signed them “the Gov.”

Three years later, in October 1948, Parker seized the opportunity to obtain a more prestigious title on a trip to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. With
Gabe Tucker in tow, he
called on an old carny acquaintance, Bob Greer, then an aide to Governor Jimmie Davis, who’d had an earlier taste of fame as a country singer with “You Are My Sunshine.” Parker
and Greer carried on about their old shenanigans—“cutting up jackpots” in the carny vernacular—and Tucker, amused by Parker’s outrageous stories of the showman’s
swindle, declared that anyone who could snow with such velocity should have a title, and put the request to Greer. Thrilled at the prospects of such an inspired con, Parker refused to leave town
until the document, which commissioned him as a Louisiana colonel, with all the rights, privileges, and responsibilities thereunto appertaining, was in his hands.

Until now, Parker had requested that the members of Arnold’s band refer to him as Popsy, a feigned intimacy designed to wheedle favors out of them. (“You like your room? Buy Popsy a
cigar.”) But things had changed.

“He turned around,” as Tucker remembers, “and said, ‘In the future, Mr. Tucker, you will make sure that everybody addresses me as Colonel.’ ” And so the
former army deserter now carried what many construed as a military title.

In his early years with Arnold, Parker was dictatorial in the extreme, laying down the law with theater managers over concession rights, and stripping Arnold’s band members of the songbook
sales they shared in arrangement with Eddy. Now the old carny kept the songbook money for himself and his family, sending Bitsy and Bevo out in the aisles with their arms loaded up with books,
pictures, and programs, and installing Marie at a table in the lobby.

“The specter of Tom selling pictures and records down the aisles of a venue was one to behold,” says Bob McCluskey, former general promotion manager for RCA Victor. “That, to
my knowledge, no pop manager had ever done.”

But it also sent a seething shiver through Little Roy Wiggins. Parker delighted in stirring up trouble among the band members, who, before his arrival, had enjoyed an easy camaraderie. Since
they never seemed to have an argument when he wasn’t around, eventually they recognized it as a control mechanism, Tucker seeing how Parker loved it when “all of us would run to him so
he could be the great fixer,” and how the tales of internal bickering gave him a window onto everything that went on with his star.

When Eddy told Parker that Wiggins was irate at the loss of $100 a
week in songbook commissions and intimated he might quit, Parker sent the message that he didn’t
care what Little Roy did. “Coinnal,” as Wiggins mocked the way Parker pronounced his new title and his inability to say
r
’s, had decided that’s the way it was going
to be.

With pressure building, an altercation was inevitable, and it came one night in El Paso, Texas, when Eddy played a private party there. Afterward, Wiggins, drinking a beer, headed for the bus to
take him to the hotel.

“Where do you think you’re going with that beer in your hand?” demanded one of Parker’s staffers. “You’re not getting on this bus with that beer.”

“Just who in the hell says I’m not?” countered the five-foot Wiggins, empowered by the brew.

“The Colonel says you’re not.”

“Well, fuck the Coinnal!” Roy cursed in anger, and then went to Eddy and explained what happened. “I’ll kill that big, fat, sloppy mother,” he spewed. Eddy calmed
him, said Parker was wrong, and he would speak to him about it tomorrow. But back at the hotel, goaded on by Vic Willis of the Willis Brothers, a featured act on Arnold’s shows, Wiggins could
stand it no longer, remembering every slight he’d endured since Parker came on board—how he’d advised Arnold to take the band off a percentage basis and put them on salary, and
how he’d cut them out of Arnold’s record royalties, something Eddy promised when he formed the band in 1943. Finally, Wiggins picked up the phone and called the Colonel himself.
“It’s one of the things I am proudest of in my life,” says Wiggins. “I cussed him for thirty minutes—at least thirty minutes—until, well, he got to cryin’,
really.”

A tearful Parker tried to explain about the beer. “Don’t you know about insurance?” he said.

“Don’t run that ‘snowplow’ at me,” Wiggins retorted. “I ain’t drivin’ that damn bus.”

For three days, the men saw not one glimpse of each other. Then Wiggins was on the hotel elevator when it stopped on Parker’s floor. “Woy,” said Parker, standing in the door
and waiting to get on, “I want to talk to you. Everything’s all right between me and you, except one thing. Did you say, ‘Fuck the Coinnal?’ ”

“I had embarrassed him in front of his flunkies,” remembers Wiggins. “I think that really got through to him.”

In time, the enigmatic Parker held himself above almost everyone—certainly
the powers at RCA—in a nearly Machiavellian thirst to seize and hold power. That
obsession, unencumbered by the usual ethical, moral, or social values (even his brother-in-law, Bitsy Mott, felt compelled to call him “sir”), would grow in direct proportion to
Parker’s success, first with Arnold, whom he elevated to the number-one-selling country artist, and later with Elvis. Parker saw it only as maximizing the opportunity, both for his client and
for himself.

Perhaps Parker’s earliest test came in his negotiations with Jean and Julian Aberbach, the Viennese Jews who would become an essential spoke in the wheel that drove Eddy’s
career.

In 1944, only five years after Jean immigrated to the United States to work for Chappel Music, the Aberbach brothers founded Hill and Range Songs, Inc., a Los Angeles and New York–based
company that specialized in C&W tunes.

By the end of 1945, when most New York publishers saw no percentage in country-and-western music, the visionary Aberbachs had three songs at the top of the charts and $50,000 in the bank. Not
surprising, then, the Aberbachs took keen notice of newcomer Arnold and particularly of the success that publishers Fred Forster and Wally Fowler enjoyed when the young singer recorded their songs.
To sew up a rising star like Arnold—to have him predisposed to select songs from their catalog—would be a fine thing. And so before Eddy’s recording session in early 1946, Jean
and Julian, at Sholes’s invitation, met with Arnold, Parker, and the RCA producer to present songs and perhaps work out an agreement.

In the immediate years to follow, the Aberbachs—shrewd, sophisticated, fastidiously dressed, and displaying such cultured accents and gracious European manners that some pronounced them
“oily”—offered an array of incentives to induce label executives, artists, and managers to do business.

Thus, before Arnold’s first session of 1946—his third session with Sholes and his fourth overall—the Aberbachs presented Eddy with a check for $20,000, a substantial amount of
money for the time, but perhaps not so large considering what they hoped to get in return.

“It was really for nothing, you see,” explains the erudite Julian Aberbach. “We promised Eddy that every good song that we had we would submit to him first before we went to
any other artist. Then we tried to get the best songs that we had that would fit Eddy Arnold.”

Beginning with the March 1946 recording session, where Arnold recorded two Hill and Range songs, the uptempo “Can’t Win, Can’t
Place, Can’t
Show” and “Chained to a Memory,” which climbed to number three on the
Billboard
chart, most Eddy Arnold sessions included at least one tune published by Hill and Range.
For a time, says Bob McCluskey, “almost every release of any importance was a Hill and Range song.”

To McCluskey, it was almost certain that Sholes, a family man, was secretly on the take, and that Parker, who exploited the greed of others, knew it. “If Eddy got the twenty grand, what do
you think Sholes got? [They] obviously owed [their] soul to Hill and Range after taking the money. Once it’s in your pocket, there is no turning back, because they have you and they can
talk.”

According to Aberbach, Parker, as Arnold’s manager, received 25 percent of Eddy’s $20,000, “which was more than justified, because he had [only] one artist. He always had a
deal, and he was without any doubt an excellent deal maker and skilled negotiator. But he was honest.”

Honesty, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. As the Aberbachs’ cousin, music publisher Freddy Bienstock points out Parker always had side deals, too, and especially with RCA
Victor, where in a very real sense, he was the client, not Eddy Arnold and, later, not even Elvis Presley. From the beginning of his association with the label, it was obvious to Parker that there
was plenty of money to go around, especially for the man who had the gumption to speak up and demand it, a man whose key to survival, as Gabe Tucker asserts, was always to have something better
than a contract—maybe a little something to remind a guy about when the circumstance demanded.

Arnold, while grateful for the astonishing level of success he found under Parker—by 1952, he was no longer the hayseed Grand Ole Opry performer, but the star of his own network television
show—chafed at certain aspects of the Colonel’s flamboyant style.

Indeed, Parker seemed to want to control every facet of Arnold’s life. (“All Eddy takes care of is his toothbrush and his drawers,” the Colonel crowed.) The two men clashed
about the direction of Eddy’s music—the singer, who now hated the “Plowboy” moniker, hoped to embrace a more sophisticated sound—and Arnold was continually embarrassed
by Parker’s shabby dress, his braggadocio (“Which one of our planes did you come down in today?” he’d ask Eddy in a crowded elevator), and his use of carny promotions, such
as parading an elephant through Nashville’s downtown streets to advertise Arnold’s appearances.

Yet far more troubling to Arnold was Parker’s alleged involvement
with the careers of other performers. The familiar rumor that the Colonel sold Hadacol—the
patent medicine made up mostly of ethyl alcohol—or secretly booked the entertainers for the Hadacol Caravan appears not to be based in fact. But Parker was working with Hank Snow and Tommy
Sands through his new company, Jamboree Attractions, which rankled Arnold down deep. Together, they’d sold nearly 30 million records, and the way Arnold saw it, the 25 percent he paid Parker
was for exclusivity. Then in the summer of 1953 came an embarrassing blowup in Las Vegas.

According to Roy Wiggins, Eddy, then playing the Sahara Hotel, was alone in his room when the phone rang, and the caller, thinking he had Tom Diskin, Parker’s new lieuenant, on the line,
said, “Tell the Colonel that show we got together with Hank Snow is doing okay.” Arnold, angry and shaken, went down to the coffee shop to confront the Colonel and saw him hide
something under the table—Parker would later claim it was an ad he had taken out to surprise his client—as he approached. An argument ensued outside, “and by the time I walked
up,” remembers Wiggins, “they were at it pretty good.” Eddy drew back his fist—“Don’t hit him!” yelled a frightened Marie Parker—and the singer later
sent a telegram that informed his manager he was no longer in need of his services.

The firing left Parker humiliated and deeply wounded, and the stress of it all so unraveled him that shortly after, the Colonel suffered the first of many heart attacks. Although his weight,
which had hovered dangerously around three hundred pounds, dropped dramatically during his recovery, he told almost no one about his illness, afraid that the clients like Snow, and Rod Brasfield,
and Mother Maybelle and the Carter Sisters—who were beginning to come to him and Diskin, for bookings, if not always for “direction,” as he called it—would desert him.

Worse, he feared he would lose his power at RCA, as Sholes, shifting his allegiance to Arnold, “treated him like a flea-bitten alley dog, and him and Sholes was never the greatest of
friends after that,” Gabe Tucker recalls. Immediately, he put the squeeze on Sholes and Singles Division Manager Bill Bullock—who was being whispered about as “the Colonel’s
guy”—to let him manage the upcoming RCA Victor Country Caravan, a package tour designed to showcase the label’s country stars, with Hank Snow headlining.