The Colonel (14 page)

In the spring of 1954, when RCA Records sent the Colonel out to tour some of its hillbilly stars as the RCA Country Caravan, Brad McCuen, one of the company’s Southern field men, was
assigned to accompany the prickly Parker on the road.

As part of their conversations during the long drives, Parker regaled McCuen, a child of the Depression, with the hijinks of his carnival life in the 1930s. He shared the details of how he and
two grifting confederates—known
in the trade as the “broad mob”—would set up the unsuspecting mark for crooked game operations, staging the three-card
monte, in which a shill makes a bettor think he can win by cheating the dealer, or the shell game, in which the pea under the shell was actually under the table. As he told McCuen, you had to know
how to choose your sucker, see when he was just about to buckle, and seize the psychological moment. To know when it arrived . . . Ah! That was the art of grifting!

According to Byron Raphael, Parker thought there was no finer practitioner than Jew Murphy, an old-fashioned peddler turned flimflam man.

“The Colonel took me to this one little carnival in Louisiana just so I could see him,” remembers Raphael. “Murphy would stand by this wagon full of shiny objects, and
he’d start by saying, ‘Who’ll give me a dollar for one of these beautiful lighters?’ And people would crowd around and give him a buck.

“The Colonel would turn to me and say, ‘Now watch how he hypnotizes people.’ And it was the most amazing thing. Murphy would give somebody a clock, and thirty or forty people
would start waving five-dollar bills over their heads. His assistant would rush through the crowd and pull that money right out of their hands.” Everyone received a piece of merchandise, but
it was always a “lumpy,” some substandard item, never one of the beautiful clocks from the first row of the wagon.

Raphael believes that Parker gleaned much of his skewed business philosophy from Murphy and the older confidence men of his ilk: in the real workaday world, you either conned somebody, or you
got conned. It was as simple as that. “He told me that was what life was about, and he meant it,” says Raphael. “He treated everything like a carnival.”

I
N
1938 Parker was running a penny arcade on the Royal American, selling picture cards of movie stars,
cowboys, and sports heroes, dispensed in sliding slot machines for one cent apiece, when he met Gene Austin, the first of several men who took his bravado seriously.

The popular singer was working the theater circuit to support his first and only Western film,
Songs and Saddles.
Parker, smitten with the notion of meeting a living legend—the
high-voiced crooner was known far and wide as “the Voice of the Southland”—approached him and told him of his background in carnivals, “starting as a boy with his
family,” as Austin would remember. The carny laid it on thick, promising that as a “crackerjack press agent and manager,” he knew every important contact in the region.

Austin had no need for Parker’s services just then, but the singer took his address and noted that Parker was “a great salesman who had the ability to back up his
conversation.” Several months later, Austin got in touch.

In his prime, Gene Austin had been a sensation beyond all imagining. The best-known singer of the late 1920s, Austin became not just the first crooner, making way for Rudy Vallee and Bing
Crosby, but the first true pop star, with the attendant fame and adulation that would later grace the careers of Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, and the Beatles. From 1924 to 1934, he sold an
astonishing 86 million records—5 million alone of “My Blue Heaven,” an upbeat ballad that celebrated the domestic bliss of “Just Molly and me /And baby makes three.”
Grown men blubbered.

Austin’s first royalty check from RCA Victor Records totaled $96,000, an almost unfathomable sum in the pre–income tax years of the ’20s. But soon that and the $17 million that
followed disappeared like a wispy dream, squandered on nights of carousing with famous friends like
Louisiana politician Huey Long and jazz great Louis Armstrong, and on the
buying of cars, mansions, and speakeasies.

By the time Austin hooked up with Tom Parker in the late ’30s, it was all but over. The ’29 crash had nearly buried the entertainment industry, and when it recovered, Bing Crosby had
eclipsed him in popularity. Austin, a two-fisted drinker who had begun to experience throat problems ten years earlier, doubted that his voice would hold up much longer.

On the night he chanced to meet Parker, Austin, then thirty-eight years old, was just about to headline a tour of the Star-O-Rama Canvas Theater, a traveling tent show that traversed the rural
South in nine large trucks. That’s when he sent a wire to Parker, who agreed to meet him in Atlanta and showed up with Marie in tow. On the surface, Gene Austin and Tom Parker—or Tommy,
as he called him—made an odd couple, the tuxedoed toast of the town and the coarse young carny with his righteous disregard for Middle America’s social norms and etiquette. But Austin
took an immediate liking to Parker, who loved to hear about the grander escapades of Austin’s career, when as a young heartthrob, Austin would return to his hotel room to find women hiding
under the bed. Parker was enthralled; what he wouldn’t give for an act like that!

For now, Parker busied himself with the job at hand, which was to help Austin’s new manager, Jack Garns, secure bookings for the tent show and to promote them with the carnival techniques
he’d learned from Peasy Hoffman. Driving an old panel truck with its best days behind it, Parker traveled the backwoods towns of the South to stake out a prime lot for Hoxie Tucker, the boss
canvas man responsible for hauling and maintaining the three-ring tents. Then he set about securing permits, lining up sponsors, scheduling advertising, handing out flyers, and finally billing
posters, plastering the paper sheets on anything that didn’t move, using a glue made out of flour and water. In essence, his job was to do almost anything he could to drum up business,
ballyhoo the star, and diddle the townsfolk into a close approximation of frenzy.

That included the restaurateurs, from whom he not only solicited tie-in advertising, but also promoted free meals, hinting that the troupe might want to eat there every night, never mentioning
that the Star-O-Rama carried its own cookhouse.

“It was obvious Tom knew his business by the way he went about things,” the singer wrote in his autobiography,
Gene Austin’s Ol’ Buddy.
“In a short while,
he had the show going full blast. It looked like we would never know anything but success and money.”

Such sweet victory convinced Parker, with his almost maniacal need for control, that he, and not Jack Garns, should guide Gene’s career. In becoming an important
manager, Parker saw, he might attain a level of power, fame, and wealth on his own. As he told Gabe Tucker years later, “The stars come and go, but a manager can work until he
dies.”

Little by little, Parker began to find reasons to circle back to the show, to get closer to Austin and to ease out the hapless Garns, much the way he would outmaneuver others in the early days
of Elvis Presley’s career.

Whether Parker actually became Austin’s manager during those years, as he later claimed, is open to dispute. But the two became fast friends, and whenever the opportunity allowed, they
headed for Hot Springs, Arkansas, to sample the glamour of the fast life—of racetracks and night life and illegal gambling, a smooth sleight of hand practiced in elegant casinos that doubled
as meeting places for big-name entertainers and notorious racketeers.

The giddy atmosphere of Hot Springs clearly agreed with him. In a picture taken there in 1939, a grinning Parker strolls down the sidewalk arm in arm with Hoxie Tucker, and in his hepcat
sunglasses, two-tone shoes, and combed-back hair—thinning dramatically with each passing year—Parker was the very definition of the confident con on the make. Walking the streets of Hot
Springs, Arkansas, that summer day, Andreas van Kuijk unmasked Tom Parker for what he was, the hustler extraordinaire. Never again would he allow himself to appear so slick and unguarded.

At the season’s end, Austin crowed about his “proud, bulging bank account.” But it was then that Austin learned that the government was attaching most of the show’s
profits for back taxes. Now Parker was forced to be creative in keeping the show up and running. When the troupe played Tupelo, Mississippi, he found prophetic good luck in the hometown of then
five-year-old Elvis Presley. “We sold out and made enough money to get out of town,” Parker remembered years later, speaking in that same small town, and adding how he’d left the
tires off the truck as collateral for the grocer, “which we did in a lot of small cities in those depressed times.”

However, when the outcome was different and they still owed a local hotel, Parker would string up a big banner—
HELD OVER BY POPULAR DEMAND
!—and the show would
stay on until the bill was paid.

The Star-O-Rama Canvas Theatre continued to limp along for several months, but only through Parker’s reliance on human nature. Before he
took to the road each time,
he’d have Austin sign a fistful of checks, which he presented at gas stations with his usual pomp and flourish, telling everybody how grand it was to work for the great Gene Austin. -
“That’s a real autograph there—you might want to hang that on the wall!” he’d suggest to the owners, since each check framed meant one fewer cashed, a stunt he would
repeat with Elvis in the mid-’50s.

Finally, though, there was no stopping the inevitable, which arrived during a tour of Virginia in 1940, when a marshal attached the gate receipts and equipment.

In the bleak days of 1940, with a family to care for and no money coming in, Parker found it more difficult to believe that things would soon get better, especially for a Dutchman whose accent
sounded vaguely German as the country inched closer to conflict overseas.

On September 1, 1939, the citizens of Tampa unfolded the
Morning Tribune
to find the banner headline of
WAR
and the chilling news that German planes had just
bombed Warsaw.

Within a year of that terrible day, two events transpired that might have dramatically altered the fate of both Andreas van Kuijk and Thomas Parker.

The first was the congressional passage of the Smith Act, or the Alien Registration Act of 1940, which required all non-U.S. citizens to register with the federal government.

Fathered by Congressman Howard Smith of Virginia, the act was aimed at curbing subversive activities. But in forcing all aliens to register, at its heart, the act worked to offer legalization to
millions who had not followed proper channels to remain in the country. Instead of being deported, as dictated by previous laws, an illegal alien would now be allowed to stay if he could prove five
years of residence with good moral character, or if he showed that deportation would result in serious economic detriment to a spouse, parent, or minor child who was a U.S. citizen or a lawfully
permanent resident.

The Alien Registration Act of 1940 should have thrilled Andreas van Kuijk. Not only did it offer amnesty for his eleven years of illegal residency, but as with his U.S. Army experience, it could
set him on a path to become a U.S. citizen. Yet as Tom Parker, he had a decidedly strange reaction to this extraordinary opportunity—he ignored it. And in doing so, he passed up a chance to
easily resolve his illegal status.

The irony, says Marian Smith of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, is that “as an overstayed crewman [from 1929], after three to
five years, he might have
been nondeportable, in that the statutes of limitations would have run out on that offense. But to not register at all [in 1940] was a big violation. And yet we have no record of him.”

Why would Parker be so reckless? His reaction to the second important event of 1940, that of the first peacetime draft law in U.S. history, was just as strange.

For on October 16, when Thomas Andrew Parker went to local board 1 in the First National Bank Building to fill out his registration card and establish a classification record, he made no mention
of prior service in any branch of the armed services. By using his new middle name, he silently insisted that it was Thomas Parker who had served in the U.S. Army, not Thomas
Andrew
Parker. Tom Parker dared not chance resurrecting old ghosts from his past, especially one from 1933 who had undergone a particularly horrific stay at Walter Reed Army Hospital.

Perhaps because the Parkers never stayed long in one place, in filling out the registration card, Parker gave the Motts’ address—1210 West Platt Street—as his own. And in
big-shot style, he named Gene Austin, 181 South Poinsettia Place, Hollywood, California, as his employer.

Parker’s real source of income during this time was far less glamorous than any alliance with Hollywood. After the heady experience of guiding Austin’s career, Parker was now reduced
to tending animals at the fairgrounds, where he also ran pony rides, employing a string of six ponies he’d bought in Kentucky while scouting locations for Austin.

Aside from the ownership of the horses—which he got neighbor children to groom by pretending to name one after each of them—he was no further along than when he first came out of the
army.

Now that the off-season had arrived, Parker struggled to make ends meet, and as usual in such dire situations, turned to a scam. He dug a hole in the front yard, erected a three-foot-high
tarpaulin wall around it, installed one of the ponies in the hole, filled dirt in around the animal’s feet, and covered its legs with straw to make it appear shorter than normal. Then he
hammered a sign into the ground:
SEE THE WORLD
’
S SMALLEST PONY—ONLY
10
CENTS
! The neighbors reported him to the
authorities, who threatened to haul him in.

Yet just as Parker’s days of working his beloved ponies appeared at an end, he received perhaps the keenest stroke of good fortune of his thirty-one years. In the late fall of 1940, he
heard about an opening for a field agent at the Hillsborough County Humane Society, the shelter for homeless animals.