Rumours about Parker’s mysterious past in Holland have floated around for decades. The revelation that Parker was actually Dutch doesn’t get a mention in Peter Guralnick’s acclaimed biography of Elvis Last Train to Memphis which was published as late as 1994. The truth only emerged very gradually after Elvis’ death. A subsequent visit by Kuijk’s brother to him in America threatened to blow the Colonel‘s cover but Parker managed to hush it all up, for the time being at least. Van Kuijk’s sister stumbled by chance upon a photo of Andreas in a Belgian magazine.
It was van Kuijk’s own relatives back in the Netherlands who first twigged to Elvis’ manager’s grand deception.
As a consequence Parker “turned down dozens of offers, totaling millions of dollars, to have his famous client tour the world” 𝕔 (Dash). So apart from the brief trip early on to Canada Elvis the entertainment industry’s number one pin-up boy never got to tour the globe and show international audiences his swivelling hips and velvet voice. Without a passport Parker was housebound within the US, and as keeping a tight rein on Elvis was essential to the Colonel Parker business plan, there was no way he’d let his golden egg go off overseas without him. Elvis and the “Colonel” (Photo: Getty) ♬įor reasons only known to himself Parker never tried to acquired an American passport, so he remained an alien all his life in America. Van Kuijk entered the US illegally (probably via Canada) in the late 1920s and took on the assumed name (and identity of a Southerner) after a short stint in the US Army. Parker’s real name was Andreas Cornelius van Kuijk (alternately rendered in some articles as “Kuijk-Dries” or “Kuyk”) and he was born not in West Virginia as he always claimed but in Breda in the Netherlands. “The Colonel” was not actually “Tom Parker”, an assumed identity he adopted. But there was a much darker, clandestine element in Parker’s past that explained Elvis’ stay-at-home career. The ex-carny Parker was notorious for several things, among them his vice-like grip on Elvis’s career his way over-the-way fee for managing Elvis’ career (25%, later increased to an outrageous 50%) his insistence on Elvis getting a 50/50 cut in songwriting royalties even though Elvis contributed zilch to the actual writing of the songs he recorded, and everyone’s heard about his pre-Elvis entry into business, painting sparrows yellow and selling them as canaries. The reason for this striking anomaly in the Elvis career path was apparently all about Elvis’ ubiquitous manager, “Colonel” Tom Parker. Light was shed on the puzzle of Elvis’s non-event international performing career for me many years ago when I was thumbing through a copy of Elvis For Beginners 𝕓 one day at a bookshop. At the time Presley’s reluctance to journey overseas was attributed by a number of observers to the singer’s fear of flying – notwithstanding the fact that Elvis regularly took domestic flights within the US to shows.
In fact Elvis only left American shores a couple of times during his entire lifetime, once for a tour of duty in West Germany as part of his compulsory military service, and the other briefly to northern neighbour Canada for two shows each in Toronto and Ottawa in 1957, followed later that year by a single performance in Vancouver (Elvis was not accompanied on his Canadian trips by his manager Tom Parker).
EP in Ottawa 1957 (Source: Elvis Presley Photos) ♬Ĭonsidering how universally popular and well-known Elvis Presley was 𝕒, during the entertainer’s heyday there was much conjecture about why “the King” of the entertainment industry failed to capitalise on his phenomenal record sales by touring internationally – like virtually every other successful pop and rock music act.
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