"ELVIS Presley and Colonel Tom Parker were the most successful artist/manager team in the history of show business." This, no doubt, is only a slight variation on the claims being made all over the world since Parker's death as a result of a stroke last Monday. With all due respect to the man, I'm here to tell you that such statements are a bloody lie. Or, at least, incorporate a reading of "success" that is so limited and ill-informed as to be a joke. A sick joke. At the expense of Elvis Presley. In every sense.
Let's begin with the money. Such claims invariably stem from the belief that Elvis became a millionaire less than a year after employing the Colonel, remained one of the highest paid actors in Hollywood during the 1969s and attained a similar status in Las Vegas right up until his death. Nice fairy tale, right? And it sure does add weight to Presley's pivotal position as the "poor-boy-made-good" in the American Dream. Sadly, it ain't substantiated by facts.
Yes, Elvis did have more than a million dollars in his bank account on December 31st 1956 but 21 working years later when he died, his checking account totalled $1,055,173. In other words, Elvis Presley was virtually bankrupt and had recently been told he needed to tour in order to meet the costs of "carrying a whole circus on his back", according to Todd Slaughter, ex-president of the Official Elvis Presley Fan Club of Great Britain. Not exactly a healthy reflection of the "most successful artist/manager, is it? At least, not as far as Elvis is concerned.
Slaughter also offers us a rather telling insight into Presley's "health", on a more obvious level during what turned out to have been his final tour.
"At the beginning of Elvis In Concert you see a very shaky Elvis manoeuvre his way down the steps of a plane then cut," he once told me. "CBS television left out the rest of the scene. But what happened was that I was at the end of the steps, being kept back by Colonel Parker. Then he eventually thrusts me forward. Yet what I remember most is the abrupt manner in which he prodded Elvis with his walking stick and said you give this (award) to him. I could tell Elvis was very ill. His eyes were bloodshot, his lip was bleeding and it looked as if he couldn't see too well.
Six weeks later, on the day he was due to begin another tour, Elvis Presley died, a development which prompted the Colonel to say "this changes nothing" and, 24 hours later, led to him standing by the corpse in Graceland, urging Presley's distraught father, Vernon, to sign a merchandising deal on the spot. Which he did. He also kindly advanced" the Elvis estate a million dollars to pay off the singer's debts. And, yes, rock history books get it right when they say he arrived for the funeral dressed in a gaudy Hawaiian shirt and wearing a baseball cap.
Colonel Tom Parker also was wrong to say that Presley's death changed nothing. It certainly transformed his own fortunes. Because the fact is that towards the end he'd begun to book his protegee into smaller venues, as Presley's pulling power had begun to pall. Elvis also was deemed to be "unpredictable and maybe even unbankable" in Las Vegas, according to his friend, Marty Lacker.
And if that was the situation in the United States, why hadn't, "the world's greatest manager tapped into the lucrative market, abroad, you might ask? Well, this brings us right back to the beginning of the story. You see, even though Colonel Tom claimed to have been born in Huntingdon Virginia, he was in fact born Andreas Cornelius van Kuijk, in Holland on June 26th 1909 and roughly 20 years later, gained "illegal entry" into the US. Not surprisingly, this made him reluctant to apply for a passport lest his "illegal status" be discovered. That said, one suspects that in his later years Elvis Presley himself also had no desire to pass through any international checkpoints lest the world discover his need for drugs.
Many fans also believe Parker made no great effort to help his client break his drug habit and that, on the contrary, he used this knowledge to keep the singer under control. It also is widely accepted that Presley's drug use accelerated during the period in Hollywood when he was contractually obliged to star in a rapidly deteriorating series of movies. Likewise following his return to live performances, in 1969, when the assembly line of movies was replaced by endless tours - though, again, Presley himself can hardly be seen as blameless in terms of the drug use which would lead to his death
However, the accusation most often levelled at Colonel Tom is that he "killed" Elvis, artistically.
Not just through tangling him up in movies and tours, but as a result of "backroom deals" done when he first signed the singer to RCA Victor, in 1956. For example, composers were expected to sign away publishing rights if
Presley recorded their songs. In time, only sub-standard songwriters agreed to this, with Lennon and McCartney, at one point, walking away laughing at the thought that they would be asked to sign away the rights to a concept album they'd written for Elvis which he never even heard about.
Equally in relation to Hollywood: despite Presley's expressed longing to be accepted as "a serious actor", Parker increasingly alienated quality directors such as Michael Curtiz and Don Siegal, who had worked with the singer in early movies such as King Creole and Flaming Star. By 1964 he chose, instead, Hollywood's "King of the Quickies Sam Katzman, to direct Kissin Cousins, which he filmed in just 17 days. And yes, although by 1965 Presley's movies had grossed $125-$135million, Parker had been so eager to sign his original deal with Hal Wallis that he failed to notice that both he and Elvis could have made a great deal more money if each movie had been negotiated separately on the basis of profits from the previous flick.
But then, by that stage, Parker was probably happy with the 50 per cent cut he was taking from Presley's earnings; And more. When Elvis Presley's estate finally took the manager to court in 1982, it was discovered that he had always structured deals to benefit himself more than Elvis. Indeed, it was revealed that when RCA purchased the Elvis Presley back catalogue in 1973, the Colonel came away with £6.2 million and Elvis got £4.7 million. Given its ever-escalating worth in the years since the singer's death, this selling of Presley's back catalogue was seen as the single most ludicrous deal ever done by Parker and part of the reason the American courts finally decided he had "no legal right to, or interest in, the Presley estate".
And that, friends, is the how the story really ended, with Parker spending the last decade of his life in his Las Vegas apartment, disbarred from even publicly discussing Elvis Presley. Again, hardly the history of the "most successful artist/manager team in the history of showbusiness", is it? That's why I suspect very few Elvis Presley fans cried when they heard the news that Colonel Tom Parker had died.
