What threatened to give away his Dutch heritage was the word “book,” which he delivered with three O’s, rhyming with “fluke.”Įlsewhere in this section of the film, Parker-who in real life had sold the network on the idea of a Christmas special so he could turn Elvis into a late-’60s Bing Crosby-appears as a bumbling rube in his insistence that Elvis sing “Here Comes Santa Claus.” It’s funny, but renders Parker ridiculous. Plesley”), and with J, which he could pronounce as a Y (“you yust missed him”), as evident in the phone call he had with Canadian DJ Red Robinson. He had trouble with the consonants R, which sometimes came out as an L (“Mr. His accent, on display in a rare interview with Ted Koppel in the ’80s, sounded more like a slight speech impediment mixed with the insulation of a rural upbringing. Hanks gives Parker a pan-European-cum-Nazi accent, but in real life, most people bought his story of hailing from Huntington, West Virginia, a relatively isolated area in the ’50s. Here’s more about what the movie gets right and wrong. He’s always Tom Hanks, cladded up in a fat suit, prosthetic jowls, and an exaggerated nose drooping from a boiled egg of a face and pate, sometimes resembling his pal LBJ. Hanks, on the other hand, never disappears into the role of Parker. Though Austin Butler is a little too pretty as Elvis, and can’t replicate the hypnotic pull of Presley’s exotic good looks, he’s nonetheless a convincing prince from another planet. Tom Hanks plays this villainy broadly with cartoonish gusto, veering somewhere between Snidely Whiplash and Sydney Greenstreet. ![]() But Luhrmann’s Colonel is straight out of Faust, dripping with the evil of Mephistopheles. As someone who knew Colonel Parker and had three, tense, three-hour meetings with him over a two-year span in the ’90s, I admit there were times I felt a chill of evil from him that scared the hell out of me and made me fear for my personal safety, especially during a ride through the Vegas desert. In his frenetic, dazzling, exhilarating mess of a movie, Elvis, Baz Luhrmann has done much the same when it comes to Colonel Parker, showing us only one side of a highly complex and intensely fascinating and mysterious character. Why bother to paint both sides? Just present the side you want to show. The other remained in its dilapidated state. Elvis had paid $55,000 for the thing, but the Colonel, snowman to the core, apparently had only had one side of the old yacht painted-the side that faced the dock. As the press cameras clicked away, and the freshly painted Potomac gleamed in the background, the Colonel chuckled to himself. He graciously accepted the “piece of shit,” as Thomas is said to have called the boat, to sell for cash. Jude, the Memphis research hospital Thomas had founded to help find cures for catastrophic childhood diseases. With them was actor Danny Thomas, there on behalf of St. On February 14, 1964, five days after the Beatles made their debut on The Ed Sullivan Show, Elvis sat at a press conference with the Colonel on the pier at Long Beach, California. ![]() feather in the cap of his only client: Elvis Presley. He would donate the rusting hulk to charity and put a P.R. He saw the Potomac as just another snow job, as he called his art of the con. ![]() Some called it his “Floating White House.” But Parker, who was born in Holland in 1909 as Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk and never became an American citizen, didn’t care about that. In 1963, Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis Presley’s audacious manager who had gotten his start selling candy apples in carnivals, read in the paper that Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidential yacht, the U.S.S.
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