‘The Colonel and the King’ review: Elvis biographer tackles Tom Parker

The popular perception of Colonel Tom Parker is that he chiseled Elvis Presley out of a lot of money, forced his participation in some really bad 1960s movies and ensured Presley’s late-career servitude to Las Vegas with a gambling addiction to match the King’s own drug habit. But this is not the story Peter Guralnick looks to tell in his mammoth new book, “The Colonel and the King: Tom Parker, Elvis Presley, and the Partnership that Rocked the World.”

The book is long on the “Colonel,” a moniker Parker claimed as his first name after the governor of Louisiana gave him the honorary title in 1948, and short on the King, who, after all, has been the subject of countless previous volumes. Some of the best were actually written by Guralnick, including “Last Train to Memphis” and “Careless Whispers.” Few writers know more about early rock ‘n’ roll and roots music, or have such passion for the subject. If you haven’t read Guralnick, you should make a point to.

Does that mean you should read “The Colonel and the King?” Only if you deeply seek a comprehensive study of Elvis’ longtime manager, who, it must be said, led a fascinating life defined by self-mythology and willful deception. Guralnick knew Parker from 1988 until his death in 1997, and you get the feeling the author saw his subject also as a friend. The book isn’t hagiography, because Guralnick does so much research and reporting for every book that he’s incapable of writing a one-sided account of any subject. That said, “The Colonel and the King” often reads like a Parker apologia, or at least a concentrated effort to set some records straight.

For instance, there’s Parker’s oft-reported reluctance to let Elvis tour internationally near the end of his career, for the reason that Parker wasn’t a U.S. citizen and therefore didn’t have a passport. “The subject of much uninformed speculation,” Guralnick writes, suggesting other reasons. “How could Elvis go to Japan, with its strict drug laws, how could he pass through all the customs stations he would have to clear in Europe if it were not to be a single small-country tour, without his prescribed medications? And who was going to carry those medications for him?”

Author Peter Guralnick is a passionate expert on early rock ‘n’ roll and roots music.

(Mike Leahy)

Parker’s background as a carnival worker is often used to deride him. How could a mere carny know about the music business, or qualify him to steward the king of rock ‘n’ roll? But the liveliest and most revealing parts of “The Colonel and the King” actually come before the Colonel meets the King, as Guralnick paints a picture of a tireless hustler desperate to reinvent himself.

Parker long claimed that he was born Thomas Andrew Parker in West Virginia. In fact, he was born Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk in Breda, Holland. As a boy, he went by “Dries.” His father was a liveryman and retired soldier. When young Dries fell in with a family circus and taught his father’s horses to do tricks, his dad roared that the kid “was no son of his, that he would never amount to anything, and, after beating him to within an inch of his life, announced that he would be banned from having anything to do with the stables.” As a teen, Parker smuggled himself to the U.S., got sent back, then made the trek again, this time successfully.

He developed a habit of being unofficially adopted by surrogate families and then disappearing without a trace, a pattern that continued when he joined the U.S. Army, went AWOL and eventually received an honorable discharge in 1933, with a certificate of disability that cited reasons of “Psychic Psychogenic Depression” (Parker claimed he was discharged for having a bad leg). He eventually ended up in Florida, where he became a jack-of-all-trades carny and developed a sharp instinct for advance publicity and promotion.

Elvis wasn’t Parker’s first music client; he developed his chops first with early pop superstar Gene Austin, then country star Hank Snow. But when Parker first witnessed Elvis and Elvis mania at the Louisiana Hayride in 1955, he was determined to manage him. Then it was on to selling him, cunningly and ferociously, to RCA, 20th Century Fox and whoever else would help build the mighty Elvis industry.

“The Colonel and the King” is a hunk of a book, weighing in at 624 pages. That includes about 250 pages of annotated letters to and from the Colonel, which might have been better used, in truncated form, spread throughout the narrative proper. You also get the sense that perhaps the author was rather quick to take Parker for his word, considering Parker himself once joked that he was writing an autobiography called “The Benevolent Con Man.”

One can admire Guralnick’s thoroughness and sense of mission while also wishing for tighter results. I found the arc of Parker’s story quite intriguing, even as I got a little tired of it.

Vognar is a freelance culture writer.