The Colonel and the King review: Peter Guralnick's biography of Thomas Parker looks at how much the manager benefitted from the star

The Colonel and the King: Was Elvis’s manager a heartless villain or just a priggish philistine?

Music

Elvis Presley and 'Colonel' Tom Parker having breakfast together in 1958. Photo: Getty

On August 16, 1977, Elvis Presley died of a heart attack, aged 42. Shortly after, Elvis’s manager, Colonel Thomas Parker, treated the tragic news like an unplanned, egregious accounting error that still had the potential to be corrected. “Elvis didn’t die, the body did,” Parker famously told a journalist at the time. Parker died in Las Vegas, aged 87, in 1997. Five years later, Alanna Nash published The Colonel: The Extraordinary Story of Colonel Tom Parker and Elvis Presley (2003).

Like Baz Luhrmann’s film, Elvis (2022), Nash’s biography portrayed Parker as a tasteless cheapskate crook, who dro