\u201cThe Elvis book was an extreme example of rigorous self-suppression,\u201d Guralnick says with a laugh. \u201cI was determined to keep out of it completely. I don\u2019t think that\u2019s as true of any of the other books. What I was also determined to do was, to the best of my ability, rescue him from the mythicisation, the whole process of creating someone who was either a superhero or, in the case of the Colonel\u201d \u2013 aka Tom Parker, Presley\u2019s manager \u2013 \u201cthe way people perceived him as a super villain.\u201d<\/p>\n
A stray phrase can create a universe. In his introduction to Last Train to Memphis Guralnick described a eureka moment, driving down McLemore Avenue in South Memphis in 1983, past the old Stax studio, when his friend Rose Clayton, a native Memphian, pointed out a drugstore where Presley\u2019s cousin used to work.<\/p>\n
\u201cElvis used to hang out there, she said; he would sit at the soda fountain, drumming his fingers on the countertop. \u2018Poor baby,\u2019 said Rose, and something went off in my head. This wasn\u2019t \u2018Elvis Presley\u2019; this was a kid hanging out at a soda fountain in South Memphis, someone who could be observed, just like you or me, daydreaming, listening to the jukebox, drinking a milkshake, waiting for his cousin to get off work.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust to be there on that street where the First Assembly of God church was,\u201d Guralnick says, \u201cand there\u2019s a boarded-up drugstore, and Rose says, \u2018Poor baby.\u2019 It just galvanised me, caused me to recognise the possibilities of not writing in this theoretical way about Elvis, which I had up until that time.<\/p>\n
\u201cI had that same kind of revelation when we got into the archives of Graceland through the good graces of Jack Soden\u201d \u2013 president of Elvis Presley Enterprises, who opened the singer\u2019s mansion to the public \u2013 \u201cway back, and we started reading these letters. Then to have the advantage of the Colonel\u2019s widow, Loanne \u2013 I was just going to do [a book of] the letters, because I thought they offered a window into an interior story, but she became so caught up in the idea [of a biography], determined to do justice to Colonel.\u201d<\/p>\n
And so, after Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley, which appeared in 1999, we come to the third instalment of Guralnick\u2019s trilogy, The Colonel and the King: Tom Parker, Elvis Presley and the Partnership That Rocked the World.<\/p>\n
Guralnick has a taste for stalking phantoms, whether in Searching for Robert Johnson or Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke. In many ways \u201cColonel\u201d Tom Parker, born Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk in the Netherlands in 1909, was the archetypal American dream chaser, the self-created migrant, a man with no past, who might have fallen off the back of a truck like Frank Chambers in The Postman Always Rings Twice, before quickly establishing himself as a carny, then as a talent manager and promoter.<\/p>\n
![\"Elvis](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/FHOD4LBI5JH5PHXVGIWVA27ATI.jpg\")
Elvis Presley and manager Colonel Tom Parker in Miami. Photograph: NBC\/Getty Images <\/p>\n
\u201cThis is the ultimate American self-invention,\u201d Guralnick concedes. \u201cAnd the way in which he invented himself is he used all of the aspects of his real self, his real background, his birth date, his interests, his love of animals, his love of the carnivals. He used all of them but transposed them to an America he sought out from the time he was 16 years old.<\/p>\n
\u201cReally, he wanted to be American before he could even speak English. He stowed away, got sent back at 16, came right back again. Here\u2019s what I wonder \u2013 you might have an angle on this, because Ireland has developed such a passion for country music, and for dressing up country and everything \u2013 but did he read comic books? Did he see movies? You know, I try to get in touch with him; I call him up many times in my dreams. I have yet to get an answer!\u201d<\/p>\n
It must be a bizarre experience, I suggest, to immerse oneself so completely in a subject\u2019s life for years at a time.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo much of that derives from [the biographer] Richard Holmes, from [his book] Footsteps, his framing of it, the way the person you\u2019re trying to write about, the character you\u2019re pursuing, you feel like you\u2019re gaining, you\u2019re gaining, you\u2019re gaining, and then he or she disappears around the corner: \u2018Where\u2019d they go?\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I finished the Sam Phillips biography\u201d \u2013 Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock\u2019n\u2019Roll<\/a>, from 2015, about the founder of Sun Records \u2013 \u201cI said, \u2018That\u2019s it. No more!\u2019 I was thrilled with the Elvis book. I was thrilled with Sam Cooke; that was an immersion in a world that was so extraordinary and wide-ranging.<\/p>\n \u201cSam Phillips was more of a self-invented world, but there were no limits to it. It was without boundaries. I was convinced I didn\u2019t want to do anything further, because it involves such total immersion. What are the specifics? What was the colour of the sky on that day?\u201d<\/p>\n This is not a question of blame, but Elvis began to stumble in public<\/p>\n Phillips \u201cbecame a great friend, but I would ask him these questions which really were of no relevance to him, and he would touch his head and say, \u2018You\u2019re making my brain hurt.\u2019 But he would make the effort. People really want to tell their own stories.\u201d<\/p>\n Tom Parker had long threatened to write his autobiography. (How Much Does It Cost if It\u2019s Free? was one his pet titles.) He never got there, but he was a prolific \u2013 some would say compulsive \u2013 letter writer, and many of his dispatches are collected in the new book. <\/p>\n In some ways Guralnick, who knew the Colonel as an old man, has charged himself with fulfilling that vow. The character he reveals is far more complex, and more sympathetic, than the Machiavellian plotter of matinee biopics. For one thing, the Colonel steadfastly refused to interfere with Presley\u2019s creative process, always confining himself to business negotiations. Why did he get such a bad reputation?<\/p>\n \u201cPeople like to mythologise. Elvis was, in many circles, considered sort of an idiot savant. I started writing about him when he put out those singles in 1967 and then the [1968 comeback] special and then From Elvis in Memphis, but I wanted to take him seriously as a creative artist. That was something that was more difficult for people to get their head around, just like Jerry Lee Lewis<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cJerry Lee Lewis was a f**king genius. He was perceptive; he was insightful … He was also, as he would be the first to admit, an idiot when it came to money, when it came to women, when it came to taking care of himself. But he was not a cartoon figure.<\/p>\n \u201cWhy did the Colonel get this reputation? One [reason] was nobody had any idea what he did. He was totally uninvolved in Elvis\u2019s creative process, but he was totally committed to furthering Elvis\u2019s creative process, and he signed on to doing that almost from the moment they met.<\/p>\n \u201cExcept for Sam Phillips, who didn\u2019t have the money to promote him, nobody else saw what Colonel saw, which was not necessarily the music that Elvis was doing but the vision that Elvis had. He saw Elvis as being entirely apart, and was prepared to set aside all the conventional success that he had achieved \u2013 which was the greatest success that anyone could achieve at that time within the world, with Eddy Arnold and Hank Snow \u2013 and he was prepared to walk away from that in a minute for this untried, untested, unproven kid that he saw unlimited potential in not for money but for artistic self-expression.<\/p>\n \u201cI would say, until the mid-1960s, maybe even until Las Vegas, he was seen as the smartest manager in the business, somebody whose imperious sense of humour set him apart and above. I mean, who did Brian Epstein<\/a> seek out when he wanted advice? Nobody ever questioned his integrity.\u201d<\/p>\n So how did this trailblazing character end up adrift, lost, purposeless, prey to a gambling addiction?<\/p>\n \u201cThis is not a question of blame, but Elvis began to stumble in public. After the glorious Las Vegas debut, descriptions of him in the New Yorker and New York Times as a God come down from heaven, his performances began to suffer, his abuse of prescription drugs became more and more evident. And the sense that he was stuck,\u201d Guralnick says.<\/p>\n \u201cAll of a sudden, who is there to blame? Well, Colonel: \u2018He didn\u2019t give him the artistic opportunities. Colonel is stealing his money,\u2019 all this kind of thing. It\u2019s understandable in a sense. Colonel\u2019s perspective was the artist wears the white hat, the manager wears the black hat; the manager takes all the blame. <\/p>\n \u201cThe thing that came as a shock to me was the extent of the tragedy of the ending, on both Elvis\u2019s side and on Colonel\u2019s side. If you look at the portrait that I drew in Looking to Get Lost\u201d \u2013 a collection of Guralnick\u2019s profiles \u2013 \u201cor in Careless Love, Colonel is a Falstaffian figure. I thought of him as a character who was untouched by any of this. And it\u2019s absolutely crystal clear from what Loanne told me, which comes straight out of her diary, her journal, how devastated Colonel was by his own addiction.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"Elvis](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/STSGX4642RFOZEHXLO33LFPECA.jpg\")
Elvis Presley and his manager Colonel Tom Parker in Hawaii, March 1961. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives\/Getty Images <\/p>\n