The Colonel : the extraordinary story of Colonel Tom Parker and Elvis Presley

Resource Information

The work The Colonel : the extraordinary story of Colonel Tom Parker and Elvis Presley represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in San Francisco Public Library. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

The Colonel : the extraordinary story of Colonel Tom Parker and Elvis Presley

Title remainder

the extraordinary story of Colonel Tom Parker and Elvis Presley

Statement of responsibility

Alanna Nash

Creator

• Nash, Alanna

Contributor

• hoopla digital

Subject

• Impresarios -- United States -- Biography
• Parker, Tom, 1909 June 26-1997
• Electronic books
• Presley, Elvis, 1935-1977

Genre

• Biography

Language

eng

Summary

Almost the only indisputable fact about Colonel Tom Parker is that he was the manager of the greatest performer in popular music: Elvis Presley. His real name wasn't Tom Parker - indeed, he wasn't an American at all, but a Dutch immigrant called Andreas van Kujik. And he certainly wasn't a proper military colonel: he purchased his title from a man in Louisiana. But while the Colonel has long been acknowledged as something of a charlatan, this book is the first to reveal the extraordinary extent of the secrets he concealed, and the consequences for the career, and ultimately the life, of the star he managed. As Alanna Nash' prodigious research has discovered, the Colonel left Holland most probably because, at the age of twenty, he bludgeoned a woman to death. Entering the US illegally, he then enlisted in the army as 'Tom Parker'. But, with supreme irony for someone later styling himself as Colonel, Parker's military career ended in desertion, and discharge after a psychiatrist had certified him as a psychopath. He then became a fairground barker, working sideshows with a zeal for small-scale huckstering and the casual scam that never left him. And by the height of Elvis's success, Parker had become a pathological gambler who, at the same time as he was taking, amazingly, a full 50% of Presley's earnings, frittered away all his wealth in the casinos of Las Vegas. As Nash shows, therefore, the often baffling trajectory of Elvis Presley's career makes perfect sense once the secret imperatives of the Colonel's life are known. Parker never booked Presley for a tour of Europe because of the dark secret that ensured he himself could never return there. Even at his most famous, Elvis was still being booked to play out-of-the-way towns in North Carolina - because the former fairground barker (who shamelessly negotiated as such even with top record company and film executives) knew them from his days on the circus circuit. And Elvis was trapped playing years of arduous seasons in Las Vegas - two shows nightly, seven days a week, until boredom and despair brought on the excessive drug use that killed him - because for Parker he was an open chit" whose huge earnings prevented his manager's losses at the gambling tables being called in. Alanna Nash knew Parker towards the end of his life, and has now uncovered the whole story, improbable, shocking, and never less than compelling, of how this larger-than-life man made, and then unmade, popular music's first and greatest superstar

Cataloging source

Midwest

Dewey number

782.42166/092

Index

no index present

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

dictionaries

Target audience

adult