The Colonel (7 page)

“He just changed identity,” says Marie, who believes he chose the name Tom Parker in homage to a stowaway who was thrown overboard. “He wanted to remain unknown.” There
would be more sporadic letters, and after awhile, he would sign them solely with his new moniker.

Usually, he gave no return address, offering just enough information to let the family know he was all right. The letters were carefully worded, teasing almost, more for what they didn’t
say than for the news they conveyed. Sometimes he sent photographs that suggested he was having a ball—a small black-and-white snapshot in which he stood next to a large American car in some
tropical setting, and another one of himself by a swimming pool. The family thought he must be a chauffeur for a very rich man.

Then came a third, provocative photograph that placed him between two other men, sitting on a beach in an old-fashioned one-piece bathing suit, his legs drawn up and his knees together, his
hands crossed in front of him in an almost feminine pose.

Just where was Andre, and what was he doing? And who in the world was this Tom Parker, who had such a strong hold over him?

Thirty-one years would pass before the family would learn that answer.

I
N
1957, Colonel Tom Parker was riding cross-country, returning to California from his home in Tennessee.
Behind the wheel was twenty-three-year-old Byron Raphael, a William Morris agent-in-training that Parker plucked from the mail room a year earlier to become the first of his Morris-paid assistants.
The “Parker School for Trainees” would become part of Hollywood legend for both the rigor and the humiliation that the manager foisted on his “students.” But at the time,
Raphael only knew that he loved and feared the man he called Pops.

Parker, whose marriage was childless, would tell the young man he thought of him as his adopted son. Whether that was entirely true, certainly on that 2,000-mile road trip, he trusted Raphael
enough to share one of his closest secrets.

“We were driving through Hobbs, New Mexico,” Raphael begins, “and it was snowing. I couldn’t keep the car on the road—we were sliding everywhere—and we
stopped at this little motel. There were very few rooms available, so I had to share a room with him that night.

“He started out by telling me about how he was made a colonel by the governor of Louisiana. And then he said, ‘Where do you think I was born?’ I said, ‘Well, I guess
Tennessee.’ And he just told me the story. He said he made a deal with somebody to come over, and he worked in the kitchen of the ship, as a dishwasher, I think.

“The way he arranged it, he was supposed to stay sixty days and then
go back. And he said they were going to give him a paycheck when he landed, but he didn’t
want to get the check, because he felt they might find out where he was. So he never picked it up, even though he had no money. All he wanted to do was get to this country and disappear into the
heartland to start working in carnivals.”

His route, from what he told various sources, was through the island of Curaçao, in the Dutch West Indies, via England. From Rotterdam, he sailed for one of the British ports, probably
Southampton, with a possible stop in France to pick up cargo. If he took a passenger ship to England, he likely would have jumped to a tramper or a freighter for the run to the Dutch West Indies,
since the passenger ships concerned themselves with North Atlantic trade.

Eventually, he wrote home that an English friend had given him the papers he needed—presumably a passport and visa—to enter the United States. But whether the friend arranged for him
to “become” Tom Parker during his layover in the British Isles or, as Nel believes, while Andre was still in Holland, is unknown. And if he already had a Dutch passport, as several
members of the family believe, the more curious question is why he needed another in a different name.

Whatever the answers, he seemed to be going to a lot of trouble. In Curaçao, he apparently changed boats again and quickly moved on.

From here, the picture of Andre van Kuijk, just weeks away from his twentieth birthday, begins to blur. In all probability, he entered the United States through the gulf port of Mobile, Alabama,
although the names recorded in the ships’ manifests for that year fail to bear witness to Andreas van Kuijk or Thomas Parker. Dirk Vellenga, the journalist who chronicled Parker’s Dutch
origins, first for the Breda newspaper
De Stem
and later in a biography,
Elvis and the Colonel,
speculates that Andre came in on a rumrunner, a boat transporting illegal liquor to
America. According to Lloyd Shearer of
Parade
magazine, Parker himself said he gained entry through Mobile on a Dutch fishing boat. Either way, that would have been the boat that issued
the paycheck he never picked up.

For some reason, those events were on Parker’s mind in 1957, the morning after his late-night disclosure to Byron Raphael in a roadside motel.

“That’s when he told me the rest of the story—how fearful he was that he might be deported, or if he ever left the country, that he might not be able to get back in.

“He said, ‘You know, Byron, we’re never going to be able to take Elvis
abroad to do personal appearances.’ By that time, Elvis was already the
biggest star in Japan, and also in Germany. And the offers from Europe were for many millions of dollars, even then.”

Since Parker’s personality was so forceful (“He gave you the feeling that he was omnipotent,” says Raphael), it never occurred to the teenager to ask him why he didn’t
call on his powerful friends to solve his passport problems, especially given his celebrity and wealth.

But now the answer seems obvious. It wasn’t that Parker
couldn’t leave
the country. Through the years, he accumulated many influential friends in all ranks of
government—including President Lyndon B. Johnson—who could have solved his problem with a single phone call. The truth of the matter was that Parker
didn’t want to leave
the country. And not even the promise of money beyond his wildest dreams could stir him from his spot.

For a man who judged the worth of every deal by money alone, such virulent aversion to international travel begs two nagging questions: Why had he never registered with the U.S. government,
bypassing, as late as 1940, the safety net of the Alien Registration Act, which required all aliens to comply with the law, but did not discriminate between legal and illegal residents? And what
was outside the refuge of the United States that frightened a man who otherwise seemed afraid of nothing?

“The Smith Act, or the Alien Registration Act of 1940, wouldn’t have necessarily made him legal,” explains Marian Smith, historian at the Immigration and Naturalization Service
in Washington, D.C., but as an overstayed seaman, Parker could have registered and applied for certain kinds of relief. “And I am curious as to why he didn’t,” she muses.
“Failure to register was subject to punishment, but I’m sure he could have later just paid a fine. It’s very odd.”

The search for his mysterious truth spawned a host of imaginative explanations through the years. The first is the theory that he might have been a low-level government spy, or carried papers
for the leaders of a radical social movement. But although the U.S. government used Dutch citizens as drops in Nazi-occupied territory in the years before World War II, Andre was long gone from
Europe by then. Besides, his family says he demonstrated no political agenda, and the selflessness of such an act—even if paid—doesn’t fit his psychological make-up.

The second tale—that he fled Holland after “knifing a man to death in a fairgrounds brawl”—sounds more plausible. The alleged incident was reported in 1997 in the British
tabloid
The People,
as an introduction to
a memoir by reporter Chris Hutchins. But, alas, Hutchins says he has “no recollection of such a story,” and
furthermore hasn’t the faintest idea how it landed atop his published piece. The FBI, credited as the source, is equally unaware of such occurrence.

However, the third story is harder to shake off. If true, it could answer every question about the enigmatic behavior of Colonel Thomas Andrew Parker.

In the days just after Elvis Presley’s death in August 1977, Dirk Vellenga was sitting at his desk at
De Stem
when he received an anonymous phone call. It was a man’s voice:
“Do you know that Colonel Tom Parker comes from Breda? His name is van Kuijk, and his father was a stable-keeper for van Gend en Loos on the Vlaszak.”

While this information had been published before, first by Dineke Dekkers in the fan club magazine
It’s Elvis Time
in 1967, and then in Hans Langbroek’s 1970 eccentric
booklet
The Hillbilly Cat,
Vellenga thought it only rumor. His curiosity now piqued, he began poking around in the ashes of Parker’s early years, interviewing his family and
schoolmates, and soon began to sift out the fragments of the life of - Breda’s most famous nonresident. The first of Vellenga’s splashy articles appeared in the newspaper in September
1977 and started the taciturn reporter on a quest—perhaps an obsession—that drives him still today. Even though he long ago left reporting to become an editor, he has continued to file
stories on the subject every few years, even as late as 1997, twenty years after he began.

At the end of one of his pieces, Vellenga posed a question: “Did something serious happen before Parker left that summer in 1929 for America, or maybe in the 1930s when he broke all
contact with his family in Breda?”

One reader thought he knew the answer and in 1980 mailed a letter to Vellenga at the newspaper. The document had a hushed, dark-alley tone, as if its author were afraid that someone might be
reading over his shoulder. It carried no signature, but the urgency and gravity of the words made it seem somehow real, as if the author experienced an unburdening in the telling:

At first, Vellenga hardly knew what to think. Could it be true? The reporter was intrigued to find that, indeed, there had been such a murder. Anna van den Enden, a
twenty-three-year-old newlywed, the wife of the potato trader Wilhelmus “Willem” van den Enden, had been bludgeoned to death in the kitchen of her home behind the shop. The crime was
what the Dutch call a
roofmoord,
a murder with intention of robbery, since the bedroom and bathroom had been ransacked in an apparent search for money.

More surprising, the date—May 17, 1929—coincided with Andre’s sudden disappearance.

Today, a careful reading of the original police report—handwritten in Dutch and numbering more than 130 pages—reveals a woefully inadequate investigation of the crime. The murder
weapon, possibly a crowbar, was never positively identified. No background check was done on the victim. And once several witnesses reported seeing Anna’s brother-in-law, Jan van den Enden, a
contractor, near the shop that morning, police focused solely on him, detaining him as a suspect. Eventually, however, he was released, and no one was ever brought to justice for Anna’s
murder. The crime remains unsolved to this day.

There is not a single shred of evidence to tie Andre van Kuijk to the murder of Anna van den Enden. His name does not appear anywhere in the police report, and until the anonymous letter arrived
at the Breda newspaper fifty-one years after the fact, no one in Holland had spoken of his name in connection with the crime.

Yet a set of circumstances makes it impossible
not
to speculate that Colonel Tom Parker in fact may have gotten away with murder.

Although Andre had been living in Rotterdam and America for several years, it was almost certain that he knew Anna Cornelia Hageners before she married, either in childhood or during his return
to Breda at age eighteen. Only three years apart in age, they apparently attended the
same church, St. Josefkerk. Andre also knew her husband’s family. Johannes van den
Enden ran the café where Adam van Kuijk spent his Sunday afternoons, and the elder van den Enden’s home on the Beyerd was just around the turn from the van Gend en Loos stables.
Furthermore, Anna’s twenty-four-year-old husband, Willem, was fond of
kermis,
or fancy fair. Like Andre, he traveled as far as Oosterhout when the
kermis
came to town.

And there was another connection. The van den Enden greengrocery was located at Nieuwe Boschstraat 31. Nieuwe Boschstraat is merely the continuation of Boschstraat, where Andre went to public
school. What schoolboy, and especially one as fond of fruit as Dries, would not have stopped off at the market for an apple after school?

Certainly he would have known the shop, even if it had been in the hands of a previous owner when he was a child. And he would have remembered that of the two doors in the front, only the middle
door led inside the shop. Then, too, the van Kuijk family is unsure which grocer employed him for deliveries when he first left school. Had this been the one?