A Good Guy Movie Star Steps Into the Shadows

As the King's manager in the biopic Elvis, Tom Hanks says he tried to take audiences someplace new

- By H. Alan Scott

EVEN TOM HANKS THOUGHT HE WAS AN ODD choice to play Elvis Presley’s manager Colonel Tom Parker in director Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis (opening in theaters June 24). “When Baz came in and first talked about Elvis, I couldn’t figure out why in the world he would come to see me,” Hanks recalls.

For one thing, Hanks had little interest in Elvis. For another, the actor specializes in decent all-American Everymen and Parker was a mysterious wheeler-dealer who managed (some say exploited) the King throughout his singular career while remaining almost anonymous himself. Hanks remembers thinking, “I don’t know what the man looks like. I’ve never heard his voice.”

Still, Hanks says he was intrigued and only got more interested as he started researching Parker. What he found was a “devious mix of self-serving and moxie of genius somehow.”

“There was not an artistic bone in Colonel Tom Parker,” he says, “he didn’t care about the music, he didn’t care about the movies. He cared about the deals. He cared about making sure that his boy didn’t just have a million dollars worth of talent, but actually had a million dollars.”

Born Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk in 1909 in Holland, Parker came to the U.S. illegally in 1929. He made a living in circuses and carnivals across the South, before getting into music promotion for country stars like Eddy Arnold and Hank Snow. He was rewarded with the honorary title of colonel of the Louisiana State Guard after helping singer Jimmie Davis win the governorship in 1944. In 1955 he met a then little-known Elvis Presley. A year later with the release of “Heartbreak Hotel,” Elvis became a household name.