The Colonel (36 page)

Now, Elvis had persuaded Captain Beaulieu to let Priscilla come to Memphis and attend Immaculate Conception High School, where, he told him, the girls wore uniforms and
studied under the tutelage of stern-faced nuns. The implication was that Elvis would marry Priscilla when she was old enough, but “he didn’t give them a time,” she remembered
later. “He just said, ‘I want her here.’ ”

The immediate promise was that a chaperoned Priscilla would live on nearby Hermitage Road with Vernon and his new wife, Dee. That arrangement lasted only a matter of weeks, Priscilla slipping
back and forth between the houses. With Grandma Minnie Mae Presley serving as lenient watchdog, the teenager soon took up residence at Graceland, sharing Elvis’s bed—though chastely,
she maintains—and learning the drug protocol that allowed her to participate in his night-for-day world.

During Presley’s army years, Parker had steadfastly refused to allow Elvis’s most serious girlfriend, Anita Wood, to travel to Germany to see him. (“We had to keep everything
so quiet . . . the Colonel said it would hurt his career.”) But though the Colonel took an unusual liking to Priscilla, he was furious at such a Lolita-like setup. Elvis was now twenty-eight
years old, with twelve years’ difference in their ages. Not so long before, in a redneck hormone storm, the piano-pounding Jerry Lee Lewis had ruined his career by marrying his underage
cousin. This situation wasn’t nearly as dangerous, but if discovered, it would still be a scandal, and Presley’s movie contracts had morals clauses in them—a fact, along with
paternity suits, that was never far from Parker’s mind.

If Elvis insisted on living with Priscilla for any length of time, the Colonel saw, they needed to marry, and Parker told him so. A marriage might calm Elvis down, especially in Hollywood, where
the starlets lined up to be admitted to his parties.

After first joining Elvis in California, where he was making
Fun in Acapulco
for Paramount, Priscilla was relegated to Memphis, where she waited impatiently for him to return between
pictures. Priscilla was not alone in noticing that his behavior, fueled by a steady stream of uppers, downers, and sleeping pills, was becoming frighteningly erratic. In fact, one night
Elvis’s temper was so raw he threw a pool cue at a female party guest who had insulted him, injuring her shoulder and collarbone. He was sorry—he broke down and cried and said he
hadn’t known what had come over him, except he felt increasingly boxed in by the lightweight movies he derisively termed “travelogues” for their quasi-exotic locales. He was doing
three and, soon, four a year, rubbed thinner with every picture, and suffering nosebleeds on the set from anxiety.

Fun in Acapulco,
Elvis’s fifth film since
Blue Hawaii,
was a perfect example of the kind of empty fare that continued to satisfy his fans, if not
the actor himself, and is memorable only for a quavering, if coincidental connection to the life of Andreas van Kuijk. In it, Elvis plays an ex–circus performer, an aerialist, who in a moment
of fright and misjudgment, allows his brother to fall to his death. Traumatized, he flees the circus world to escape his past and assume a new life in a foreign country.

The film, which at one point has Elvis’s character, Mike Windgren, sending a telegram to his hometown of Tampa, Florida, was directed by Richard Thorpe (
Jailhouse Rock
), who again
explores the theme of a young man jeopardizing his future through the tragedy of accidental death. As in his earlier film, Thorpe includes the character of a talent manager—a pint-sized
Mexican shoe-shine boy (“Are you sure you’re not a forty-year-old midget?” Elvis asks)—who takes 50 percent of his - client’s money, insisting he’s not an agent,
but a partner. Since Elvis was unable to travel to Mexico, the studio relied on a variety of process shots, mostly background projection, to place him south of the border.

By now, in keeping with the Colonel’s cross-promotional synergy, RCA culled most of Elvis’s singles from the largely dreadful soundtracks. Since 1961, he’d enjoyed a
chart-topper with “Good Luck Charm,” and watched a pair of hits, “Can’t Help Falling in Love” and “Return to Sender,” climb to number two. Yet no Elvis
release was a sure bet anymore—some singles failed to crawl out of the thirties—and Parker put the pressure on Bill Bullock in RCA’s New York office to make things happen.
“I may not type good,” Parker joked, a comment on his two-fingered keyboard style, “but they sure do know what I mean up there.”

Indeed, they did. A memo went around at RCA with the instructions “always remain friendly with the Colonel,” a directive that struck fear in the hearts of those who remembered how
he’d gotten one executive fired over an altercation regarding Brother Dave Gardner, whom Parker had brought to the label. Now, if Presley wanted his records mixed one way—with his voice
as part of the instrumentation—and Parker wanted Elvis more out front, it was Parker the label obeyed.

In early ’62, he worked out a new arrangement with RCA concerning previously released material. The agreement provided both Elvis and the Colonel with substantial new revenue from special
side deals, which Parker would later refer to as joint ventures. They would split those monies 50–50.

The contract, which Parker insisted be no longer than one page and contain no legalese, would be renegotiated seven months later. It was
changed so often, said one
employee, that “RCA has nothing to say about anything Elvis does or anything we do for him.” Though the label’s lawyers insisted the company back out of promoting a
forty-three-city tour in late ’62—an artistic disappointment for Elvis and a financial loss of more than $1 million—Parker was regarded as the absolute power.

Consequently, the staff went into a frenzy if he happened to drop by unannounced. Joan Deary, Sholes’s secretary, worked out a signal with someone downstairs so she could get the office in
order before she met him at the elevator, when Parker would “just explode out into the hall.” The first time it happened, she rushed to put out an autographed picture the Colonel had
sent her boss for Christmas. “None of us liked it,” she remembered, “and we’d put it in a drawer behind the door to Steve’s office. I went flying in there to pull it
out, and I banged into Steve, who was also trying to get the picture out of the cabinet and on display.” Bill Bullock was only half kidding when he sent Parker a large office clock inscribed,
“Colonel, it’s whatever time you want it to be.”

Unlike the men at RCA, ever-present for Parker like dutiful sheep, publicist Anne Fulchino was the only one to contest the Colonel. Concerned about Elvis’s morale and the erratic chart
placement of his records, she asked Tom Diskin to take her to see Presley on the Paramount lot one day in early ’63. “That kid was not only unhappy, he was ashamed for me to see him
prostituting himself with those crummy pictures,” she remembers. She sat down with him and explained her campaign for promoting his records, “practically drawing him a diagram on how
you build a star.”

Elvis realized he needed to make major changes in the direction of his music and his movies, and promised Fulchino he would do so. But though she believed Elvis “knew Parker was not the
right manager for him—the way the Colonel wanted him to go was not the way Elvis wanted to go”—he allowed himself to be hamstrung with unsuitable projects.

On the set of
Kissin’ Cousins,
filmed only months after his talk with Fulchino, Elvis told costar Yvonne Craig that he figured the Colonel would know when the time was right to
return him to dramatic pictures. Was Elvis merely saving face? The Colonel’s dominance was so strong that Presley may have thought he was incapable of standing up to him, even to demand
stronger scripts after Parker turned down his one request to approve them. (“If they’re smart enough to pay you all that money, they’re smart enough to write a good
script.”) But Elvis’s reticence—his lack of emotional backbone—proved to be his fatal flaw.

Adam van Kuijk with three of his children, from left Ad, Jan, and Johanna, about 1922. He would die three years later, at the age of fifty-nine. (Courtesy of Maria Dons-Maas)

The van Kuijk family lived in the stable of the van Gend & Loos building, seen here to the right of the music hall, marked “Kon. Erk. Harmonie De Unie.” (The
collection of Dirk Vellenga)

Anna van den Enden was murdered in the living quarters behind this shop at Nieuwe Boschstraat 31, in May 1929. (Tony Wulffraat)

Andreas van Kuijk, aka Tom Parker, circa 1926–7, likely during his Chautauqua days on his first trip to America. (Elvis Presley Enterprises. Used by permission)

The well-dressed young gentleman, age nineteen, in the year he disappeared from his native Holland. (The collection of Dirk Vellenga)

Private Thomas Parker (seventh from left, middle row) in the 64th Coast Artillery Brigade Regiment, stationed at Fort Shafter near Honolulu, probably fall 1929. Fellow soldier
Earl Kilgus stands behind him, back row, fifth from left. (Courtesy of Earl Kilgus and Robert H. Egolf III)