How Elvis Presley Was ‘Discovered’ by His Longtime Manager, Colonel Tom Parker: Excerpt From New Book ‘The Colonel and the King’

In many ways, it’s the origin story of the rock and roll revolution: How the man who called himself Colonel Tom Parker (although he never achieved such a military rank) discovered the man he would loft to a previously unimagined level of stardom: Elvis Presley.

The pages and hours of video on the subject are uncountable — with the most recent being Baz Lurhman’s 2002 film “Elvis” — but Parker was a master of illusion who literally learned his craft in the circus. He put all of his skill, experience and intuition into launching Elvis into superstardom and keeping him there — and put just as much effort into obscuring his own past and reinventing himself. Over the decades his methods and motivations have been the subject of intense scrutiny and not a little criticism.

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But who was Colonel Tom Parker? A Dutch-born man named Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk, but beyond that, the details get hazy — intentionally so, because Parker held his cards famously close to his vest.

Peter Guralnick, who wrote the two-volume definitive biography of Presley, “Last Train to Memphis” and “Careless Love,” was so struck by the contents of Parker’s archive — which he gained full access to after the books had been published — that he felt an equally exhaustive volume on the legendary manager was necessary.

“We started going through the files and it was just so astonishing,” Guralnick tells Variety. “The letters gave such a different picture of the Colonel than I had before, so much more of an in-depth picture. Anyone who knows anything about Elvis, once we get to the Elvis years in the book, it’s looking at what happened from a completely different angle.”

Indeed, the book dramatically humanizes Parker from the one-dimensional Svengali depicted for decades: It look sat his upbringing in the Netherlands, his family and his eventual migration to the United States; his stint in the armed forces and his years on the road with carnies and circuses; and his years managing singers Eddy Arnold and Hank Snow before, as we see below, he ran across an electrifying young singer named Elvis Presley in 1956.

“The Colonel and the King” is out today (Aug. 5) on Little, Brown.

The Beginning of It All

He first became aware of the boy in early 1955 through an old pal in Texarkana, Arkansas, a DJ, radio personality, and promoter named Ernest Hackworth who went by the name of Uncle Dudley. Hackworth, who, like so many other promoters, worked on his own shows as a country comedian, reported that this kid from Memphis had drawn more than eight hundred people to a little schoolhouse in New Boston, Texas, on January 11, which was a heckuva draw for an unknown artist whose name he usually got all jumbled up.

Oddly enough, Colonel was later reminded, he had actually been told about the boy two months earlier by another old colleague, Oscar Davis, who was wont to say he had made several fortunes (true — he had managed Hank Williams at the height of his career) and lost even more (equally true). Davis, a smooth-tongued, silver-haired operator who went back even further than Colonel in the world of carnivals and show business, was a peerless pitchman, always immaculately dressed, always sharp as a tack — in the view of a mutual acquaintance who did business with them both, he differed from Colonel in only two ways.

Unlike Colonel, Oscar Davis looked the part, “he looked like the man with the money” — but also unlike Colonel (with whom you could operate with complete confidence on a handshake basis) you couldn’t trust a word that he said.

Oscar had hit a rough patch lately and was advancing an Eddy Arnold tour for Colonel when he met this Presley boy in Memphis and had even gone to see him perform at some little club where the kid had really gotten the audience worked up. But for one reason or another, it seemed like Oscar wasn’t emphasizing the point too strongly, or maybe Colonel just wasn’t listening that closely (with Oscar Davis, you didn’t want to over-listen), so it wasn’t until Uncle Dudley spoke to him the day after the New Boston show that he paid attention.

This time there was no hesitation.

He and Tom Diskin went to see Presley perform at the Louisiana Hayride three days later, and he was so knocked out, not so much by the music — he really wasn’t sure at first what to make of the music — as by the reaction of the crowd, that he got in touch with Presley’s manager, a Memphis DJ named Bob Neal, right away. Within a week he had him booked on the Hank Snow tour that was about to begin in New Mexico on February 14.

Even before the start of the tour, apparently on the strength of the Hayride performance alone, Colonel approached Steve Sholes about signing him to RCA, but as it turned out, the head of Presley’s little record label in Memphis, Sam Phillips, wouldn’t hear of it, in fact he seemed almost insulted by the idea, so Colonel was forced to let Steve know that it looked like Presley was “pretty securely tied up” for the time being.

From the very first dates on the New Mexico tour, the boy’s talent — not just his talent but his drive, and especially his capacity for growth — were unmistakable. When asked some eighteen months later if he took credit for Elvis Presley’s unparalleled success, the Colonel uncharacteristically demurred. “I think Presley was a star from the first day he ever started going into show business,” he said. “I knew I could help him, [but] I think anyone could have helped him that knows something about show business.”
It was astounding, the speed with which it happened.

Everywhere the Hank Snow–headlined revue played, the clamor over Presley’s performance only grew, and many nights he took the show. Hank Snow tried to hide his reaction, but Colonel could not help but be aware of it and all the ways his client’s wounded vanity played out. The boy never seemed to notice, though; he clearly thought the world of Snow, and Colonel did all he could to smooth things over, pointing out that everywhere they went, they were breaking attendance records, which surely had to be considered a tribute to the star of the show.

Things could not have been going better, in fact, for the new partnership between Colonel Tom Parker and Hank Snow. Record sales were up, and due to his assiduous efforts, Colonel never tired of reminding Snow, all sorts of new, high-paying opportunities in radio and television were starting to open up. The trades attributed these rapidly expanding horizons to a unique artist-manager relationship which Cash Box would describe as “based on loyalty, mutual respect and a common objective,” not to mention the uncommon efforts of Tom Parker, “a colorful personality [with] a natural flair for showmanship [who is] known from coast to coast . . . and respected for his sound business principles [and his] policy of doing more than he has promised.”

But, tellingly, Colonel didn’t book Elvis with Hank again until May, while Hank continued to do record-breaking business on his own.

One of the stumbling blocks — the principal stumbling block — to his doing more with Presley was the boy’s manager, Bob Neal, who seemed infuriatingly unsusceptible to persuasion, promotion, or even recognition of his own (let alone his artist’s) ever-increasing opportunities. During a brief break from touring at the beginning of March, Colonel wrote to Tom Diskin, clearly disheartened by his inability to make any headway with Neal. “I don’t see much use in wasting any [more] money or time on Presley till we know that they need us, and only when they contact us direct for help in some way.”

Things were slow in the business in general, he noted, but he had not given up on improving Hank’s royalty situation with RCA, or maybe even moving him to his old friend Randy Wood’s Dot label (though in all likelihood, here he was merely musing out loud, for his own and Tom Diskin’s benefit, about something that would almost certainly have been little more than a negotiating ploy). Meanwhile, he thought he would set up another strong ten-or fifteen-day tour for Hank, “keep getting special deals lined up,” and focus on getting him another guest shot on TV with Perry Como.

But as frustrated as he was by the Presley situation, he was not about to give up. Finally, on March 29, he was able to come to some sort of agreement with Bob Neal for a two-week series of one-nighters in Florida with Hank Snow, but he couldn’t resist needling Neal while at the same time trying to steer him toward a more realistic appraisal of the situation. Neal had to pay more attention to business, he wrote with unfeigned indignation. He had to get the Colonel a complete supply of photos and records right away. And most important of all, the boy was never going to get anywhere so long as he was on Sun Records. “I am finding out that in some places they have never heard of Elvis. This I am not saying to
knock, as you well know but to drive home the fact how sad it is that this boy does not get the spread he needs on his records.” And when Neal failed at this task, as at every other, he wrote again — and again.

The Florida tour was a triumph beyond anything that could have been imagined.

On the first date, in Daytona Beach on May 7, Mae Boren Axton, a forty-year-old high school English teacher and sometime songwriter from Jacksonville, who had been doing advance press work in the area for the Colonel for the last year or two, witnessed a kind of crowd reaction she had never seen before. A well-educated woman from a prominent political family in Oklahoma (her nephew David later became governor of the state and a three-term U.S. senator), she had grown up, she said, with “no idea” of what hillbilly music was, but she had come to like it from all the promotion work she had done for numerous hillbilly jamborees over the last few years.

Now, in her capacity as Colonel’s designated press officer, she undertook to conduct an interview with Elvis before the show, one of the first real interviews he had ever done, she imagined, judging from his polite, tongue-tied responses — but then she was almost struck dumb herself by the altogether unexpected explosiveness of his act. At one point she ran across one of her former students while Elvis was still onstage, “and she was just right into it, didn’t know who he was, none of them did. But she was just ahhhh — all of them were, even some of the old ones were doing like that. I looked at the faces — they were loving it. And I said, ‘Hey, honey, what is it about this kid?’ And she said, ‘Awww, Miz Axton, he’s just a great big beautiful hunk of forbidden fruit.’ ”

In Orlando, four nights later, the crowd called for Elvis to come back when Hank Snow took the stage, and could not be quieted during Snow’s performance. The reporter for the local paper, a complete neophyte to this kind of music (it provided “a poignant contrast to Metropolitan Opera in Atlanta, I must say,” she acknowledged to her readers), gave a reasonably enthusiastic account of the entire evening, “but what really stole the show was this 20-year-old sensation, Elvis Presley, a real sex box as far as the teenage girls are concerned. They squealed themselves silly over this fellow in orange coat and sideburns who ‘sent’ them. . . .

Following the program, Elvis was surrounded by girlies asking for autographs. He would give each a long, slow look with drooped eyelids and comply. They ate it up.” Which evolved in the blink of an eye into a full-scale riot in Jacksonville, when, at the conclusion of his act, Elvis announced, “Girls, I’ll see you all backstage.”

“I heard feet like a thundering herd,” Mae Axton recalled, “and the next thing I knew I heard this voice from the shower area, and Elvis was on top of one of the showers looking sheepish and scared, and his shirt was shredded and his coat was torn to pieces . . . he was up there with nothing but his pants on and they were trying to pull at them up on the shower.” The Colonel, said Mae, “and I don’t mean it derogatorily, got dollar marks in his eyes.”

But I think even Mae would be willing to admit that this was a reductive picture of a man she had come to admire for both his intellect and determination. Because she could tell even then that from Colonel’s per- spective Elvis Presley was not just another passing fancy to be cashed in on and forgotten, he was, potentially, a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon.

Within days Colonel was hard at work trying to set up another Florida tour. Once again, Bob Neal’s refusal, or simply inability, to take a businesslike approach was an obstacle, but one which Colonel was confident he could overcome. On May 25 he wrote to Neal in what could be taken as a lesson in coercive persuasion: “I was most happy to do what I could to help Elvis and you in getting him across in these new markets. I am always glad to work with both of you, I am not one of the type of personalities that tries to cut out a manager, as you well know a good many would do. If ever you wish to tie in with me closely and
let me carry the ball I will be happy to sit down with both of you and try to work it out.”

Evidently that must have struck a chord with Neal, who instantly initiated a phone call, which in turn prompted a second letter from Colonel, spelling out terms and conditions and laying out “the pro- tection I must have to enable [me] to tie these things up and not be fan- ning the air and spent my money foolish.”

He felt no need to mention it at the time, but the second Florida tour, scheduled to begin in just two months, would take place without the presence of Hank Snow. Snow instead would be heading up a West Coast tour of his own, his first all-out assault on that market, which would be operating under the direction of Tom Diskin and conclude with a triumphal appearance at the Hollywood Bowl.

Colonel made sure that Hank understood that he was not abdicating managerial responsibility, that every aspect of the tour would be plotted out by himself and Mr. Diskin, and that it would, of course, be fully supported by RCA. But in fact Hank couldn’t have been more pleased, and if he were to be perfectly honest about it, he would not miss the presence of Presley in the least. And it wasn’t as if he were losing anything on the deal. As a partner in Hank Snow Enterprises–Jamboree Attractions, he stood only to gain by the addition of another big moneymaking tour in whose profits he would be a full participant.

In the meantime, while fully engaged in the setup of both tours, Colonel continued to go back and forth with Bob Neal about the smallest, and largest, of matters. He dangled the promise of two weeks in Las Vegas (“The [club] owner is a good friend of mine”), which surely he would have had difficulty delivering on, but Neal didn’t bite. He continued to hector Neal about his inattention to business (“I have been waiting to hear from you,” again, and again, and again), without any tangible results.

Finally, he arranged to meet with Neal in person about a whole panoply of issues, including, once again, trying to shop Presley’s record contract to a major label, about which he believed they had finally reached agreement, only to hear back from Neal three days later: “Hold off any further announcements regarding Elvis until I have more time with him.”

On June 25, Colonel wrote to Tom Diskin in what appears to be barely concealed, barely punctuated frustration. “Get it in your mind that there is no future in anything but big deals, no small time stuff it takes as much time and no money can be made of it. You have to believe this so strongly that you will let no one get your time and ear on junk deals. Everytime we have become involved in something small [and here it is hard to believe that he is not for the first time wondering if this is how the whole Elvis experience will turn out] we have lost time money and get nowhere.”

Just how discouraged he must have been feeling is evident in the entirely unaccustomed rush of emotion that he pours into what he writes next to Diskin, with whom he has been working in perfect harmony for three years now without ever once communicating just how much the younger man’s contributions have meant to him.

“The future looks very good for you if you want to make it that way,” he writes, in a passage posing as well-meant advice for a junior partner who needs bucking up, but which could just as easily be taken as a confidence-building message to Colonel himself. “I will always protect you all I can/and I know you do the same. You are good for me and I know that I do understand you better than any-one could. Your closer to me than anyone ever has been and will be. and I know you understand me.”

The return to Florida, beginning on July 25 and ending seven days later with a benefit show in Tampa sponsored by the Sertoma Club and Clyde Rinaldi, proved to be even more spectacular than the first tour. The all-star cast was headlined by comedian-actor Andy Griffith, but it was Elvis who took the show every night, astonishing not only the audience but his fellow performers.

Once again there was a riot in Jacksonville in the course of which Elvis once again had his clothes torn off, something the Colonel made sure to mention two weeks later in an exhortatory letter to Sam Weisbord, one of William Morris’ most senior West Coast agents.

He was enclosing a set of action pictures he had had taken in Tampa, he wrote to Weisbord. (One of them would become the arresting cover of Elvis’ first RCA album some eight months later.) He was also enclosing a selection of his records. “He is presently on a small record label and they have sold this year over 100,000 of this boy’s records already, and they have no distribution whatsoever This artist seems to me to be right in line for motion picture material, television, and a stage career. . . . With the right training and advice and good material the possibilities are unlimited. His exposure on the stage does 75% towards the public accepting this artist. The talents that are hidden in this personality are unlimited.”

He didn’t hesitate to invoke Hank Snow, another well-regarded William Morris client, who “has done much to expose the talents of ELVIS PRESLEY, as he has taken him more or less under his wing and has been plugging away on all his personals and blowing the bugle about ELVIS PRESLEY.”

And he summed it all up on a not altogether unexpected note. “I can only go so far without the help of friends like you towards making the Andy Griffith, the star of the show, and Colonel, July 31, 1955. Courtesy of the Graceland Archives world aware of such great talent. You have forgotten more than I’ll ever know about how to bring this out in an artist and I’m asking you for advice to carry on and get the best results out of and for ELVIS PRESLEY and all of us.”

He copied the letter to Harry Kalcheim, the head of William Morris’ New York office, who had been instrumental in helping to broaden Eddy Arnold’s appeal with key supper-club and television bookings. And he continued to bombard Steve Sholes at RCA with letters and telegrams, ostensibly under the guise of tipping him off to something that Colonel was good enough not to want him to miss.

This might all be taken as Colonel’s usual method of operation, of course — and in many respects it was. But the lack of caution, the abandonment of all of his usual, carefully calibrated reserve, was something new. Certainly he had felt the same kind of full-blown belief in Eddy Arnold and the vast potential of his talent — but he had always proceeded with an element of circumspection, taking each incremental step only after he was confident of the success of the last. With Presley he was making no such allowance for failure. If the boy failed, he was leaving himself nothing to fall back on. Because here it was not just Elvis Presley’s musical talent that foretold an almost limitless future (though that may well have been enough in itself), it was his spongelike ability to absorb and reshape everything that he took in and experienced, his seemingly inexhaustible appetite for self-improvement.

As Colonel would one day remark in comparing Presley’s talent with that of Gene Austin, his first superstar, both were “individual artists [who] have a feeling inside them for what they are doing which you can’t teach anyone.” And as he was quick to point out with more than just a smidgen of irony, “I, as a salesman and drummer, know this [better] than the average guy.”

What turned out to be the start of the real negotiations began in August, in the immediate aftermath of an incident in Batesville, Arkansas, on August 6. Elvis had evidently engaged in some “off-color” jokes and general misbehavior with his bass player, Bill Black, the comedian in the band, and, the promoter wrote, a number of customers had asked for their money back. After ascertaining from the Duke of Paducah, who was featured on the show, that the complaint was legitimate, Colonel
immediately sent back a refund of $50.

But he also wrote to Neal on August 22 with a stern warning: “You must definitely set up a new deal with ELVIS where he gets on the stage as a singer, stays on the stage as a singer, and comes off like a singer. There is always enough comedy on any of my shows that they don’t have to do comedy. To be exact, I just can’t have any more comedy on ELVIS PRESLEY’S part of the program. ELVIS has great talents and he does not have to resort to smutty comedy to sell his attractions. When we ask for more money for ELVIS we definitely must give better production or we should sell him as a comic, and you know how much we can get for him doing that.

“I think the most important thing is that he needs guidance. He is young, inexperienced and it takes a lot more than a couple of hot records in a certain territory to become a big named artist, level-headed, courteous, and carry the responsibility that goes with being a star as ELVIS wants to be. There is no way we can play this down — even if we tried — as we would only be fooling ourselves and would be out of business in no time. My reputation is more important than my friendship and belief in the talents that ELVIS has. He can cash in on this to the fullest, but he must contribute all the qualities that I know he has or can have if he makes up his mind to do so.”

It’s hard to know just how literally this should be taken. On the one hand there is no question that Colonel was serious. He had always maintained prim, almost Victorian standards in the presentation of his shows— they were intended, he insisted to artists and promoters alike, to be good clean fun for the whole family. On the other hand, would he have actually cut Elvis loose, would he have simply walked away from his vision of the future?

I think it is perhaps safest to say that he calculated both the risk and the people involved. He was positive that the boy didn’t mean any harm — he was a good boy from a good family and he knew the difference between right and wrong, as Colonel always insisted in pitching Presley’s talents, and as he firmly believed. Nor did he have any doubt that Bob Neal, too, would be upset to learn of the complaints. Perhaps more to the point, though, Bob Neal was not the kind of man who could stand up to the pressure of being perceived to be in the wrong.

It turned out that it was his threat to walk away that finally turned the tide, that and a letter he had managed to extract from Neal and Mr. and Mrs. Presley in the midst of the Batesville crisis (his parents were still their twenty-year-old son’s legal guardians), granting him sole and exclusive representation of Elvis in nearly every way, most of all in “the build-up of Elvis Presley as an artist . . . in any way possible.”
And yet there continued to be an almost endless exchange of communications between him and Neal, most of it on Colonel’s side, as he sometimes patiently, more often less than patiently, tried to school Neal in the realities of the business, while Neal for his part almost invariably failed to grasp the point.

In September there was a break of almost three weeks after Neal wrote to Colonel that he and Elvis were “quite disturbed” by Colonel’s upcoming bookings and prices, and Colonel wrote back indignantly, and in considerable detail, that Neal and Elvis could have it any way they wanted. He would be “most happy,” he wrote, to make a settlement at the end of the current tour and “dissolve our relationship . . . because I see no point in carrying this situation on under the present working conditions if I am to be questioned everytime I make a deal.”

This went on for longer than would have seemed possible — it’s hard to say who was keeping whom on a string — until on September 17 Colonel sent Elvis a letter, enclosing a copy of his letter to Neal acquiescing to Neal’s demand for a dissolution of their association. “I hope that we will be able to work again together in future,” he wrote to the boy, with suggestions of “a good many irons in the fire that may come thru as we go along,” and he signed his letter, not without calculation, “Your Pal The Col.”

There was never any question of the outcome. Despite Neal’s plaintive talk of a “pleasant parting,” there was no real parting, and they remained in a kind of undeclared limbo for the next month. (There were, among other things, many already booked dates for Colonel to fulfill and collect his commission on.) And so Colonel continued to go about what he imperturbably declared to be his business, which was primarily to find a new label for his artist (and, really, he only had RCA in mind), with or without the help of anyone other than his loyal lieutenant, Tom Diskin.

He had never wanted anything more.

He enlisted everyone in the operation to win over Elvis’ parents, who, despite having signed that official letter of authorization, continued to be put off by what they took to be Colonel’s blunt “big city” ways. He called on both Hank Snow and Hank’s son, Jimmie, who had become close to Elvis from their tours together, along with his old friend the Duke of Paducah, whose folksy homespun humor Vernon and Gladys Presley both appreciated and enjoyed. “They were country people,” observed Jimmie Rodgers Snow, who would later leave show business to become a well-known evangelical preacher.

“They were poor, hardworking people. Colonel was too slick. And I think they were more concerned about sticking with Bob Neal and things that were working, just like anybody else that’s hard-working. The idea was to explain to them that they had to progress and go forward.” As to his father, Snow said, “They liked my dad. They were impressed by stardom, like anybody. And Colonel was smart enough to realize that he could not directly [influence] them, so he utilized anybody that could.”

Not surprisingly, he also continued to call upon every important associate, past and present, he could think of, masterfully cultivating all his contacts at William Morris as well as every one of his RCA connections going back to the start. He enlisted the Aberbach brothers, too, whose powerful Hill and Range song publishing company had originally sought out Eddy Arnold and presently had a partnership publishing deal with Hank Snow. And while he never showed any flagging of energy or enthusiasm in his everyday business (including plans for a spectacular Hank Snow–Bill Haley–Bob Wills tour scheduled to follow up on the great success of the current Snow-Haley tour), it seems obvious in retrospect that his mind was on only one thing.

But he still had the problem of his partnership with Hank Snow. He had been growing increasingly disenchanted with Snow, who, for all of their success together, simply had too inflated a view of himself to permit any meaningful collaboration. Perhaps more significantly, unlike Eddy Arnold (whom Colonel, even in the aftermath of their bitter break-up, still considered to have been a true partner), Snow had a vision of the future that was built entirely on the past. For all of his drive and determination, his emergence from a difficult childhood combined with a sense of exclusion that Andreas van Kuijk should have been uniquely able to identify with, Hank Snow simply could not imagine the world that Colonel believed Elvis Presley was about to step into, the revolutionary changes that Colonel believed even more firmly he was destined to create.

And so, although it went against all of his instincts, all of the hard-earned lessons he had taken from his earliest days in show business and all of the principles that he would continue to espouse for the next forty years — that loyalty overrode everything, that you never went back on a contract or a personal commitment — Colonel finally determined that if and when he was ever able to get the boy signed to RCA, he would have to walk away from Hank Snow.

It was his name alone that was on the agreement with the Presleys and would continue to be on all future documents, he rationalized, it was he alone who would continue to conduct the on-again, off-again negotiations with the record company — and throughout it all, Snow never exhibited the slightest curiosity about the proceedings, except to speculate that at some point there was likely to be a great deal of money coming their way.

When it happened, it happened quickly.

On October 20, Colonel had Mr. and Mrs. Presley telegram him with a carefully worded text that he had provided for them to sign, empowering him “to act as our sole and exclusive representative in all negotiations pertaining to the recording contract of Elvis Presley [with] no other person or persons . . . authorized to represent Elvis Presley.” They would be bound by his decisions, the telegram said, “as we feel that you will be for the best interest of Elvis Presley.”

A week later he heard from Neal that he was “very much upset” by what he had just learned from the Presleys, but by then Colonel had already returned from New York, where, armed with his new authority, he had initiated formal talks with RCA.

At the start of those talks, on October 24, he had telegrammed Sam Phillips from the Warwick Hotel that “Elvis Presley and his parents Mr. and Mrs. Presley have requested and authorized me to handle all negotiations towards affecting a settlement of the Elvis Presley recording contract with you. If interested will you please advise me your best flat price for a complete dissolution and release free and clear.”

An agitated Sam Phillips called him back almost immediately. What the hell are you doing? Sam railed at this man he barely knew but knew well enough to dislike intensely. What gives you the right to sell something you don’t even own? Was Tom Parker (he’d be damned if he’d call the man by his phony title) trying to ruin him? Once his distributors heard that Elvis’ contract was up for sale — even though it wasn’t — “this could cost me my company. You’re not just messing with an artist contract here, you messing with my life.”

Colonel waited him out, and when he was done simply asked, if he were to sell Elvis’ contract, what would he want for it?

“He didn’t say how much he was thinking,” Phillips recalled, “just how much would I take. So I said, ‘I hadn’t really thought about it, Tom. But I’ll let you know.’ So he said, ‘Well, look, think about it, and let me know.’ And I thought about it about thirty seconds and called him back.”

The price that he named — $35,000, plus several thousand dollars he owed Elvis in back royalties — was more than anyone had ever paid for a popular recording artist (by comparison, Columbia had paid $25,000 for the contract of Frankie Laine, an established star, in 1951). But after making a few little clucking sounds, Colonel didn’t even bother to argue — there would be no point. He had learned by now how passionate Sam was about his little record company, so he simply told Sam he would do the best he could.

What he didn’t tell him, because it would have just inflamed him even more, was that RCA had already made an offer of $25,000, which they presented in two different forms of payout for him to choose from. It was, he recognized, an extraordinary offer in and of itself, but not enough to satisfy Sam Phillips, and RCA chief legal counsel Coleman Tily made it perfectly clear that it was their final offer, there would be no further discussion of the matter.

Over the next few days he heard from Steve Sholes and Sholes’ boss, Bill Bullock, that RCA was not going to budge; however much Sholes and Bullock would like to sign the boy, the money simply wasn’t going to change. Nonetheless, Colonel set up a meeting on Saturday, October 29, at Sam’s brand-new radio station in Memphis, WHER, “the first all-girl station in the nation,” as Sam proudly branded it. The meeting was held on the very day the station went on the air after a number of technical glitches and delays, and for all the stress that Phillips was under, Sam seemed persuaded by Colonel’s point that there was no reason for theatrics on either side, this was a business meeting in the end, however difficult the decision to sell Elvis’ contract might have been for Sam to come to.

Only the three principal parties representing Elvis’ interests were there: Colonel and Tom Diskin, Sam, and Bob Neal, who by now seemed not just to have accepted the situation but to have enthusiastically embraced it. After making a token attempt to get Sam to come down on his price (“Well, you know $35,000 is a lot of money, Sam, there’s not a lot of people who believe in this thing”), Colonel simply set to work hashing out an agreement that would essentially memorialize Sam’s terms: $35,000 for Elvis’ contract and recordings, along with the recognition

that Sam would not be held responsible for any unpaid royalties and his commitment to stop distributing Elvis’ Sun records at the end of the year. The agreement would take effect on November 1 and be secured by a nonrefundable down payment of $5,000, to be transmitted by midnight on November 15.
And only the Colonel knew the money wasn’t there.

There was no room left to maneuver. The only bluff he had to fall back on was his unshakable calm in the face of RCA’s desperate plea that he listen to reason, he was going to lose the deal if he didn’t come to his senses. But he remained impervious. Despite the stakes — and his recognition that things could never go back to the way they had been if he failed — he continued to articulate the philosophy that had carried him through his entire career so far: you can’t lose a deal that you never had. And he continued to act as if he were in possession of a secret that no one else — certainly not his RCA counterparts — knew.

On the morning of the last day of the option he received a telegram from RCA Manager of the Single Records Department Bill Bullock, meeting all his terms and guaranteeing “35,000 to Sun Records, Five [as a nonrecoupable bonus] to Presley, three television guest appearances and complete promotion coverage.” Because time was so tight (“The banks close here at Two PM,” he couldn’t help but remind Bullock), Colonel volunteered that he would be “very happy to handle everything” on his end and advance the $5,000 that was necessary to secure the deal.

And he couldn’t resist the opportunity to stick the needle in a little bit further by suggesting (and one can only imagine how firmly his tongue was lodged in his cheek), “Personally, I believe the price too high [but] tomorrow he may go up again.”

In a follow-up letter to Coleman Tily later in the day, he wrote with new authority (well, not new to him, but new perhaps to Tily, a proud Princeton graduate, who would soon get used to it), “There are many details to be worked out to protect this setup and it would be best for you to come here [to Madison] and we can go on to Memphis [together] . . . I am very proud to [have] advanced the money for RCA as I am a stock holder anyway.”

And so it was that on November 15, 1955, ten months to the day from the time he had first seen Elvis perform at the Louisiana Hayride, the deal was done.

The signing ceremonies at the Sun studio six days later were an intimate affair, including Elvis and his parents, Sam Phillips, Bob Neal, the Colonel and Tom Diskin, a couple of regional RCA representatives, and Coleman Tily. In the end Colonel had gotten almost everything he wanted, including a $1,000 bonus from Hill and Range to secure their upcoming publishing deal with Elvis. The only thing he might have been disappointed about was RCA’s insistence that the purchase price of $35,000 would be accounted against one half of Elvis’ forthcoming royalties until it was fully paid off.

But he didn’t put up much of a fight on that point, because, for one thing, he was confident the boy would have nothing to worry about financially, and for another he was absolutely certain that his success would register on such a stratospheric scale that there would be no trouble securing him a new, much better contract before too long. For some reason the only signature lines provided on the contract were for H. Coleman Tily for Radio Corporation of America and Elvis and Vernon Presley, but Colonel appended his signature at the bottom as Elvis’ sole and exclusive representative.

Hank Snow flew in from Nashville for the ceremony, and though he missed the actual signing, he looks pleased as a peacock in the pictures taken at the Hotel Peabody afterward. He and Colonel drove back to Nashville together, and he never asked a single question. (“I don’t think my dad realized at the time what had happened,” said his son, Jimmie Rodgers Snow, who seemed to understand better than his father ever would just why it had happened.)

As for Colonel, I would imagine he spoke about anything and everything but Elvis Presley’s new contract on the drive home — he and Hank Snow had extensive plans going well into the next year, and oddly enough they would continue to do business, if on an understandably reduced scale (and Snow would continue to seek favors, and Colonel would con- tinue to dispense them), long after Hank realized, to his lifelong conster- nation, that he had been cut out of the Presley picture.

But what Colonel was thinking — well, one can only speculate. He may have lingered for a moment to savor his triumph, a triumph that had come against all the odds, and in the face of dire predictions from all the naysayers who never fail to crowd the sidelines. But you can be certain, he wouldn’t have lingered long. Throughout his long life, Andreas van Kuijk’s mind never focused on anything but the future, and he was well aware that now the real work would begin.

By the time he got back to Nashville there was a telegram awaiting him that said more than any mere business deal ever could. “Dear Colonel,” it read:

“Words can never tell you how my folks and I appreciate what you did for me. I have always known and now my folks are assured that you are the best and most wonderful person I could ever hope to work with. Believe me when I say I will stick with you thru thick and thin and do everything I can to uphold your faith in me. Again I say thanks and I love you like a father— ELVIS PRESLEY”

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