The Colonel (10 page)

Yet in the end, the old Dutchman decided the truth was too great a price to pay. As a lifelong carny, Parker took pride in being able to talk his way out of a tight place, and even enjoyed the
challenge. But now he realized he was in a spot from which not even the great Harry Houdini could escape, and so he settled the case before he could ever be deposed.

“We were never successful in finding his army records,” reports Blanchard E. Tual, the former guardian
ad litem
for Lisa Marie Presley, who set the lawsuit in motion. The
answers to the puzzling questions about Parker’s military life would sleep silently with him in the grave.

But a nearly two-year search for Parker’s army records, aided by the Freedom of Information Act, finally yielded a glimmer of what Parker feared would be known. While the information is
incomplete, at best it offers a vital key to understanding not only his army experience, but also the psyche of Tom Parker himself.

Parker’s principal personnel file no longer exists, having either been destroyed in the 1973 fire or otherwise “lost.” But in June 1982, when he needed to prove his military
service in the RCA court proceedings, his lawyer, Jack Magids of the Memphis firm Krivcher & Magids, contacted W. G. Seibert of the National Personnel Records Center.

At Magids’s request, and based on details supplied in the lawyer’s written communication and in a supporting letter from Parker himself, Seibert began compiling a reconstructed file
of Parker’s military service. The discharge document and final pay vouchers contained in that file, combined with ancillary records (such as morning reports and unit rosters found elsewhere)
begin to frame a far clearer picture of Tom Parker than anyone has ever seen. And also far darker.

Judging from the morning reports and rosters from Fort Shafter, Parker fulfilled his tour of duty in Hawaii without incident. And for nearly a year after he arrived at Fort Barrancas on October
24, 1931, things seemed to go fine. He enjoyed a sixty-day furlough beginning in March 1932, and when his three-year hitch was up on June 19, he collected $95.51 in wages, travel, and clothing pay,
and re-enlisted the next day. Then on July 18 of that year, he enjoyed a promotion to Private First Class, an honor that certainly would have pleased his military-minded father.

Parker, like most recruits, had every reason to be content. Fort Barrancas,
located on Pensacola Bay, was regarded as one of the prettiest bases in the country. “The
men who served here in the thirties loved it,” says Coast Artillery expert David Ogden, a park ranger at Gulf Island National Seashore.

But Private First Class Parker did not love it. Behind his controlled army demeanor, Parker was deeply restless. He had stuck with the military—an institution directly at odds with his
willful and autonomous personality—longer than he had committed himself to anything else in his twenty-three years. And perhaps he had followed orders until the thought of one more
command—one more deafening, bone-rattling blast of the big guns that guarded the mouth of the harbor—made him want to run screaming into the night.

Precisely what drove Private First Class Parker to desperate straits is lost to the blur of time. But Tuesday, September 27, 1932, a day after seven of his fellow soldiers had departed the base
on furlough, the perfect soldier calmly and quietly walked out of Fort Barrancas. Whether he had been denied furlough and refused to accept the ruling isn’t known, but that evening the army
marked him AWOL, or “absent without leave.” A week later, on October 4, he was reduced in rank to private, and after thirty days, on Halloween, Private Parker was officially classified
a deserter. If he did not return within six months, the Department of Defense would refer the matter to the FBI.

Desertion! It was the one offense that overshadowed all others. In the army, Andre, crisp in his uniform, had played a grown-up, the child imitating the father, the son becoming the
father—the two were interchangeable in his mind. But he could never really
be
the father any more than he could ever really be a soldier. And when the stresses of that conflict
mounted with those that only he knew for certain, the little boy that was still Andre fought to escape.

But where did Private Parker go when he left the serenity of Fort Barrancas? Almost certainly back to a fantasy world where he finally felt superior—if only to the marks he outsmarted. For
a check of the local newspaper turns up the fascinating fact that the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus, with its “50 big and little elephants, 700 horses . . . 100 hilarious
clowns . . . and a whole congress of freaks,” arrived in Pensacola for two performances only on September 27—the very day Private Parker went AWOL. Was this what Parker had alluded to
later in life, bragging about the days when he “floated on top of an elephant”? There, under the “big top,” in the lights and the noise, it didn’t matter what
you’d done on a nearby army base, or halfway around the
world, or even if you lied every time you spoke your name. For the next day would bring a new identity and a new
town. In this case, Tallahassee.

Parker arrived at Fort Barrancas in the fall of 1931 as one of two privates transferred from Fort Shafter. Had he brownnosed his senior officer in Hawaii specifically to be transferred to the
Coast Artillery in Florida, just to be close to the headquarters of the biggest traveling shows? Is that why the allotment checks stopped going to Holland? Had Parker been hoarding his money for
escape?

Whether law enforcement or the military found him there, or whether he turned himself in, when he returned to the base on February 17, 1933, he had been missing for 140 days—nearly five
months. Desertion was an offense punishable by court martial, and Parker pleaded for leniency, officially rejoining his unit the next morning.

But to a man with wanderlust in his blood, the punishment ultimately meted out was worse than any dishonor a court martial could have delivered. Records show that his commanding officer marked
his 140-day AWOL as lost time without wages. Then he added sixty days more: for two months, Private Parker would be placed in solitary confinement in the guardhouse jail on the post. There, he
would ponder his actions until he could be rehabilitated and restored to duty.

By the time Parker was taken from confinement on April 18, his speech was an incoherent rush of sound, punctuated by terrifying bursts of paranoia and rage. The army doctor had seen this kind of
psychotic breakdown before and, suspecting schizophrenia, had Private Parker moved to the guarded lockup ward at the base hospital for observation and treatment. Two months later, after the patient
showed no improvement, the doctor knew only one thing for certain—he could do nothing to help this soldier.

On June 19, 1933, Private Thomas Parker, having taken leave of his senses, was removed from the guarded lockup ward and sent to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. The hospital
had no locked psychiatric ward, or even a mental health facility—neuropsychiatry became a board-certified specialty only that year. But Walter Reed did reserve a wing for solders whose
behavior was unpredictable, and Parker may have been kept there if the doctors thought he was no real danger to himself. The likelihood, say army historians, is that he was transferred to St.
Elizabeth’s Hospital, a “government hospital for the insane,” as it billed itself, or transported there daily as one of Walter Reed’s pseudo-psych patients.

No longer a federal institution, St. Elizabeth’s is now run by the District
of Columbia and houses such patients as John Hinckley Jr., the would-be assassin of
President Ronald Reagan. However, no records exist to support treatment for Parker other than at the army medical center, where the staff guessed that it was not confinement that caused this state,
but rather a long-standing, pervasive psychotic process. Before his breakdown, Private Parker had likely suffered a persistent personality problem, marked by impulsive acts and disregard for the
rights and feelings of others.

The army doctor wrote out a vague but serious diagnosis: “Psychosis, Psychogenic Depression, acute, on basis of Constitutional Psychopathic State, Emotional Instability.”

On August 11, 1933, after two months of treatment, a medical board consisting of three army surgeons decided that Private Parker was ready to rejoin society. However, he would never again be fit
for military duty. They prepared his certificate of disability, repeating the diagnosis—“Constitutional Psychopathic State”—that would forever stigmatize him as a mental
patient.

Eight days later, Private Parker received his separation papers. The Walter Reed personnel concluded that since his desertion had been brought about by illness, his discharge would be
honorable.

On August 19, 1933, twenty-four-year-old Thomas Parker, a civilian now, pushed open the doors of Walter Reed Army Hospital and walked out into the summer sun of Washington’s Georgia
Avenue. In his pocket was his final paycheck of $117.57. Across town, a new president, named Roosevelt, sat in the White House.

Just exactly where Parker went when he left the hospital corridors is unknown, but once again, a sixty-seven-year-old photograph holds a clue. One of his favorite pictures
shows him as a handsome, thin young man, well dressed in a dark casual jacket and light pants, and adorned with a snappy hat and tie. He is posed with several ponies, one with a spider monkey
riding its back. The group, which includes a German shepherd, stands on what appears to be hay, in front of a large movie poster for the Christmas 1935 release
Home on the Range,
starring
Jackie Coogan, Randolph Scott, and Evelyn Brent.

The horses suggest an explanation for an employment entry in his 1994 salute in the Showmen’s League yearbook: Silver’s Ponies. Today, no one recalls ever hearing of Silver’s
Ponies. But Slover’s Ponies was a
popular kiddie ride outfit in the 1933 season of the Johnny J. Jones Exposition, which enjoyed winter dates in Tampa, Florida, that
year.

Tampa, the winter quarters of several carnivals and the hub of off-season carny life, would be Andre’s new home. And it would also be the place where the newly reinvented character of Tom
Parker would mold itself, starting with his early job of promoting Bert Slover’s ponies. Parker had once again allied himself with the carnival world, integrating himself into a social
network that at times was as intricate and as furtive as any underground railroad.

But an odd thing happened once Andre left the army. His letters home, which had never arrived with frequency, slowed to a trickle. He said nothing to his mother about his awful ordeal or what
had so occupied his time. Finally the letters stopped coming at all. In his last missive, Andre wrote in an especially emotional tone that he had very little money, was without a job, and was
struggling to eke out a living in a tough but vibrant America. As a boy he had dreamed of greatness, he said, and he expressed his belief that he could still make his dream come true—that out
of nothing and with his own hands and ingenuity, he would build a career as he saw it in his imagination back in Holland.

After that, the family heard only silence. It seemed as if Andre had been swept from the world and drowned in the vastness of America. On April 4, 1935, when a member of the Breda municipal
government inquired about Andre’s whereabouts for a routine matter—taxes, or census, or the Dutch welfare pension, perhaps—Maria van Kuijk reported with a leaden heart that Andre
was not coming home. Across from his name on the van Kuijk family Register of Birth, the government worker wrote
“Ambtshalve,”
meaning it had become apparent to him in his
official capacity that this citizen had “gone to America.” Andre was now removed from the family record and, in effect, written out of their lives.

The van Kuijks never stopped searching for answers. During World War II, Andre’s sister Johanna carried his picture, showing it to American soldiers when they reached Holland, pathetically
hoping they might know him, or perhaps had seen him somewhere and could report that he was all right.

After the war, when they had still heard nothing, Maria van Kuijk tried to remain optimistic about his return. But when another decade passed in which she waited in vain for a letter, she
figured her son was dead. Still, she lit candles for him at church, prayed for his safekeeping, and whispered the secret language that exists between extraordinary
mothers and
extraordinary sons. When she died in 1958, the same year as the death of the mother of another famous man—a singer whose name would always be linked with that of her son—it was without
the knowledge of Andre’s remarkable life in America.

“She was for me a very kind, easygoing woman,” remembers her granddaughter Mieke Dons-Maas. “But she had a sadness pain because of Andre. And it never went away.”

Unless Andre had, indeed, died, the family couldn’t conceive of such cruelty, especially since Andre and his mother had once been so close. But for reasons of shame, or confusion, or the
continuing effects of his illness, perhaps, Andre van Kuijk had no grieving mother in Holland. For that matter, Andre van Kuijk did not exist at all. Tom Parker, an orphan from Huntington, West
Virginia, had taken his place. And Tom Parker, lost and alone, grew almost frantic to find his place in America.

B
Y
1933, just as Tom Parker joined the Johnny J. Jones ranks, the future of “the Mighty Monarch of the
Tented World” was in grave doubt. At the end of the 1930 season, with the Depression signaling a steady decline of customers, Jones, who had been regarded as a genius, found himself heavily
in debt. Then on Christmas Day, he unexpectedly died of uremia at the age of fifty-six, leaving his thirty-one-year-old wife, Hody Hurd, to carry on. Now Hurd had suffered a nervous breakdown, and
with her finances equally exhausted, she would sell the once-great carnival to E. Lawrence Phillips at the end of the disastrous 1933 season.