‘Who was going to carry Elvis’s drugs and guns?’ How Colonel Tom Parker always looked out for the King

For decades, Presley’s manager has been vilified as a money-grabbing huckster. But compelling new evidence suggests the colonel was actually devoted to the star

A

huckster. A Svengali. A bully. The public perception of Elvis Presley’s manager Colonel Tom Parker has long positioned him as a byword for duplicitous artist representation, where profitability trumps art and the artist always loses out on the lion’s share.

You can see why. Born Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk, even the name Colonel Tom Parker was a confection and an invention. Therefore, the presumption runs, so was he. But in The Colonel and the King, a new biography of Parker, Peter Guralnick dispels many of these presumptions to present a far more nuanced portrait of a highly moral operator.

Guralnick knows the intricacies of this story more than anyone, except perhaps the colonel and Presley themselves, having written two doorstopper biographies of the singer (1994’s Last Train to Memphis and 1999’s Careless Love). His Parker biography is no less hefty, running close to 600 pages.