The Man Who Sold Parsley

Fawn-colored pants, white shoes, a pink satin shirt with ELVIS embroidered on the back and a small Presley hat decorated with the hero's picture--all these festooned a fat, balding, cigar-smoking man in a four-room executive suite on the Paramount lot in Hollywood. Thomas Andrew ("Colonel") Parker, 49, is the discoverer, manager and part owner of Elvis Presley; although he tries very hard to look every inch a rube, he is known on all horizons of show business as the shrewdest pitchman who ever came out of a small-time carny into the big time.

Although he has a sizable cut of Presley's estimated $2,000,000 a year income, Parker still clings to his carny ways. Once when Elvis appeared at Dallas' Cotton Bowl, Hollywood friends found Manager Parker near the main gate, selling Presley-autographed photos. His explanation: "Don't you ever get so big you won't sell pictures." He has sold other things, too, at Presley performances. Bucking custom, he makes newsmen pay for their own tickets, seldom passes out freebees even to close business associates, has been known to peddle war-surplus binoculars (at $2 a pair) to buddies who ended up in poor locations.

Cash in Advance. With Elvis just discharged from the Army and hotter than a radioactive yam--his new record, Stuck on You, is boiling with sales, and shooting began last week on his new movie, G.I. Blues--Parker is busier than ever filling out deposit slips. This week on ABC-TV, Frank Sinatra and his fellow clansmen are welcoming Elvis home--and the gesture is costing Frankie $125,000. This time the Colonel will accept a check, but he usually prefers cash--in advance. Las Vegas' gaudy New Frontier once pleaded that its check was as good as anyone's. "No check is good," replied the Colonel, his eyes soft as ball bearings. "Some are pretty good, but they got an atom-bomb testing place out there in the desert. What if some feller pressed the wrong button?"

Presley depends completely on Parker, never talks to the press unless the Colonel nods, is content to look after the hips while the man he calls Admiral looks after the Presley legend. Meanwhile, a legend is growing around Parker himself that might very well reduce P. T. Barnum to the size of Tom Thumb.

Empty Franks. The least surprising fact of Tom Parker's life is that it began in a traveling carnival which his parents worked. Orphaned as a child, he worked for his uncle's Great Parker Pony Circus, had his own pony-and-monkey act when he was in his teens. Barker, merry-go-round operator, candied-apple dipper, ice shaver for snow cones and general man-about-the-midway, he once took a job as a dogcatcher in Tampa, Fla., where he gave away hundreds of puppies to kids.

During the '30s, running a frankfurter concession, Parker beat the foot-long hot-dog fad by using foot-long buns, sticking a bit of frank into each end, and filling up the middle with onions. When the suckers howled, he pointed to little chunks of hot dog previously arranged on the ground, said: "You dropped your meat, son, now just move along." Later, as a carny pressagent, he got interested in singers, profitably managed Gene Austin, Hank Snow and Eddie Arnold before he found the boy with the coin in the groin.

Horsehair Curls. It was Presley who came to Parker: by 1955 the Colonel (the title, he claims, is an honor conferred on him by several Governors) was the top manager in the country-music field. Elvis then had little more than a guitar and an inguinocutaneous tremor--"Who is Parsley?," Parker's friends kept asking him--but RCA was looking for just such a boy and had been trying to buy Presley's contract from Sun records without success. Freelancer Parker talked RCA into putting up $35,000, an unheard-of sum for a relative unknown. Sun sold.

Many big-time singers cut up to eight records a year. Fearing overexposure, Parker drew the line at three. Nevertheless RCA has signed Elvis to a rumored $1,000,000, ten-year contract, now depends on Elvis for an estimated 10% of its business. The Colonel promotes unstintingly. As in his carny days, he has rented elephants and advertised his client with posters placed on their flanks, hired midgets to parade as the Elvis Presley Midget Fan Club, closed deals with notions manufacturers who are licensed to peddle 78 articles bearing the Presley name, from T shirts to lipsticks.

But he will not do just anything for money. When Elvis was drafted, one sharpie offered Parker a $500,000 guarantee if he would okay the sale of packets of horsehair as wisps clipped from the singer by military barbers. Parker said no. On the other hand, he also refused to let Elvis go into Special Services and spend two years entertaining troops. "A sure way to debase your merchandise," he said, "is to give it away."

Head Dogcatcher. Parker is proud to style himself the "Imperial Potentate" of American snowmen, proclaims solemnly: "One never snows anyone other than to do good; never take advantage of anyone that you have been able to snow under." Much of the snow these days comes from his office in his Madison, Tenn. home--which is wedged between a gas station and a used-car lot--where the Colonel keeps fresh the country touch. He and his wife have no children, give most of their time to a large garden, once kept a string of ponies and rented them out to all comers.

Another sideline is the planning of his autobiography, a book that will have (or so he says) one chapter about Parker, then one chapter of ads, another about Parker, then more ads. "One publisher called me and said he'd give me $100,000 for it. I told him, 'Well, I guess I could let you have the back cover for that.' "

What if, after all, Old Soldier Elvis fades away? Parker gives a carny man's shrug. "He could go back to drivin' a truck. And I could always go back to bein' a dogcatcher. Head dogcatcher, that is."

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