Free The Colonel by Alanna Nash Page B

his own,” Raphael recalls. “He would go into these periods of melancholy
where all of a sudden he’d drop his aggressive business stance and become very soft and sentimental. Several times, Colonel said he was the guy who washed the elephants. He used to water them
and take care of them, and he used to give kids elephant rides. Then he would bring it back and tie it up by the foot and wash it down.
    “He was pretty much of a loner, and he told me that he would be there with his elephants, or moving hay or dung around, and he would eavesdrop and listen in—what the carnies call
‘staying on the earie.’ That’s the way he learned a lot, just by listening to people.”
    But Andre the elephant groom was also already honing his entrepreneurial skills. “The story I heard,” says Mac Wiseman, the bluegrass star whom Parker booked in the mid-’50s,
“was that the Colonel was smart enough to get the carnival owner to give him the elephant manure that they normally hauled away. He processed it and sold it as fertilizer, or took what
everybody else considered trash and turned it into money. That sums up the Colonel to me.”
    While in many ways Andre’s association with the big “rubber cows” was reminiscent of his work in his father’s stables, he nonetheless found a great affinity with the
elephant. More than that, as Tom Parker he seemed to form some sort of primal bond with the creature. He would more quickly cry over the fate of a doomed elephant than he would over the end of a
human being.
    “Colonel was very loyal to his friends, and he didn’t forget,” offers Sandra Polk Ross, his daughter-in-law in the 1970s. “His memory was as long as an
elephant’s.”
    Predictably, the Colonel’s detractors would find less flattering comparisons: the elephant’s enormous bulk and compulsion for food; its thick hide, which makes it impervious to barbs
thrown its way; and especially its dangerous behavior when enraged.
    “He was like a giant elephant standing on flat ground,” says Memphis attorney D. Beecher Smith II, estate and tax counsel to Elvis Presley near the end of the singer’s
life.
    A 1993 made-for-television biopic carried the symbolism further, opening with a scene in which Parker demonstrates how to train an elephant by placing a rope around its neck when the animal is
young. As the elephant grows larger, it can easily break away, but without the intellect to overcome its early training, it remains a passive captive. The scene was meant to foreshadow
Parker’s command over Elvis, who could have brokenoff his relationship with his manager at any time, yet remained under his control.
    Whether Parker agreed with that characterization, during his days with Presley, he festooned his offices at the various movie studios with elephant memorabilia, from canes with elephant heads
worked into their knobby tops to stools disconcertingly made from an actual elephant leg—a big, stubby foot with huge, splayed toenails. “The place looked like a carnival midway,”
remembered Alan Fortas, a Presley entourage member.
    From his first weeks in America, then, on this, his second and final trip, Andre the elephant handler had found his personal totem. But he had yet to reinvent himself in the full persona of Tom
Parker. For that, the young man with no education, no legal papers, and no real job prospects would need to slip away somewhere, to sequester himself where he could sharpen his language skills and
have some time to think. At the same time, he would need to draw a modicum of pay, enjoy free lodging, and receive his required three squares a day. On the eve of the Depression, the solution
seemed obvious. He would go for the security of his father’s early calling.
    On June 20, 1929, Andre made his way to Fort McPherson, southwest of Atlanta, Georgia. There, the boy who had wanted nothing to do with military life, drill, or taking orders back home joined
the army.
    Or so he would later