presley31
10-02-2008, 09:04 AM
LOVE. The unmaking of Elvis Presley. Peter Guralnick. 766pp. Little, Brown. Pounds 19.99. 0 316 64402 1
Of the mass of books on Elvis Presley which have appeared since his death, very few give a real picture of what actually happened to him. All that distinguishes one from another is the degree to which the writers - his hairdressers, his secretary and a psychic - exaggerate their closeness to the King and the detail they decide to give of the horrors and weirdness of his life. Recent titles include Elvis Speaks from the Beyond and Elvis: The last 24 hours, a typical passage of which might run for several pages on the "impacted material" in Elvis's bowels and the long warm baths which he took as improvised enemas to get rid of it. The first volume of Peter Guralnick's biography of Elvis, which covered the years from his birth until his entry into the army in
1958, was a small island of truth in this sea of conjecture and bile. Careless Love, the second volume, completes the story up until his death in 1977. In his desire to get at the truth, Guralnick does touch on the lurid side of things but not for sensationalist reasons, only because it was, in fact, a large part of his subject's life. Otherwise, the only impacted material the reader comes across in this volume is the dense ream of facts with which Guralnick backs up his account. He quotes liberally from interviews with, and books by, Elvis intimates, which are full of strong opinions, but Guralnick himself is loath to force any particular thesis on to his work or describe what he thinks might have happened. Facts are everything. This sometimes makes for heavy reading, as he examines every single contract signed and every Cadillac driven (or given) away, but one's overwhelming impression is that this too often trivialized man has found his serious biographer.
And, it seems, quite often the other books were right. Elvis did develop some unhealthy habits. He liked to watch young girls in white knickers wrestling - a legacy of his childhood, he admitted, when he tussled with a friend in his backyard and caught a glimpse of her underwear. That childhood, his mother's love, and her death (on the same day in August that her son died and at the same age - forty-two - as the conspiracy theorists remind us) were guiding forces for the rest of his life. He liked to talk in baby language to his girlfriends, and they would play mother back to him. In a way, he was frozen in childhood for ever, or more particularly in adolescence: up all night, asleep all day; endless television watching, sleeping and eating broken by sporadic reading of spiritual books; a constant desire for fun, satisfied by fireworks, fairgrounds and go-kart-riding; a keen interest in the opposite sex; and half-gallon jars full of drugs.
The intriguing thing about all these habits is how early they started - by the late 1950s and early 60s this nocturnal child's life was in place, and, at that stage, he was certainly not in terminal decline. In fact, despite John Lennon's much quoted "Elvis Presley died the day he joined the army", it is striking how Elvis, even as his star faded after the massive explosion of his 1956 debut, managed to produce peaks of fame right up until 1973. There were bleak patches - between 1965 and 1969 he had no million-selling singles. But his leather-clad comeback television special was the number one show in 1968, and it catapulted him into the Las Vegas appearances which remained the greatest star attraction at the casinos until his death; he was never eclipsed by Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin orBarbra Streisand. That final peak in 1973, the Aloha from Hawaii special, was, at the time, the most watched live programme ever. And this was seventeen years after his debut. Are there any pop stars from 1982 who could today pull in a billion viewers for a concert of their old songs?
The other notable conclusion from Guralnick's set of impeccable facts is (despite the weirdness) the stability and conservativism of Elvis's domestic life. If one were to attempt to prescribe the best way for a star to survive the highs and lows of public adulation, one might make the following suggestions: remain in your home town, surround yourself with family and friends and do not fail for fickle showbiz acquaintances. Elvis did exactly that: his father and grandmother, who both outlived him, shared a house with him throughout his life. His aunts, uncle and double first cousins all lived in trailers stationed around his home. Constantly protecting him was a close-knit circle of friends, the so-called Memphis Mafia, a group of cronies much maligned for their mixture of sycophancy to and vilification of their boss. But they were friends of very long standing. Some had been at school with him; some in the army. Most of them were still around, twenty years later, when Elvis finally collapsed on the toilet; his gold pyjamas around his feet, apparently immersed in a study of sex and psychic energy which correlated sexual positions with astrological signs. The members of this circle were there day and night (and as a result can give unusually detailed biographical information); they provided the security blanket of like-minded company that Elvis seemed always to need.
Elvis himself was deeply conservative (small and big c). He watched Patton dozens of times and succeeded in meeting Patton's colleague General Omar Bradley and Vice President Spiro Agnew. On a visit to Richard Nixon in the White House in 1971, he offered his services as a special agent against "the Drug Culture, the Hippie Elements . . . . Black Panthers etc". During a failed attempt to see J. Edgar Hoover, he explained to a FBI agent that "his long hair and unusual apparel were merely tools of his trade" and "that the Beatles laid the groundwork for many of the problems we are having with young people by their filthy unkempt appearances and suggestive music". Add to this his dedicated army service, his obsession with the police, his chivalrous politeness to women and his elders, the liberal use of "sir" and "madam" in his conversations, and one ends with a picture of a Southern Conservative adolescent.
But old-fashioned values and long-standing friendships could not prevent the impending disaster. The conclusion that the Memphis Mafia, the girlfriends and the family all come to is the obvious one, that the man in the street who has not had the benefit of Guralnick's 700 pages on the subject would come to too - "Well, it was the drugs, wasn't it?" Elvis missed his mother. Fame went to the head of this originally modest, polite and intelligent man, and he became an insufferable boss to his friends. That mixture of sycophancy and vilification is not surprising in friends who are kept on a payroll and then continually sacked and rehired. His career was in the doldrums when he died. Yet all these elements and various combinations of them had happened earlier too. But the drug habit, that Elvis had begun by taking uppers in order to stay awake after night exercises in the army, kicked into full swing in 1973, and then it was simply a matter of time until the end came. His bodyguards grew used to lifting his comatose head out of soup bowls. Reviewers of his concerts began to opine that fans continued to go to his increasingly execrable performances only because they feared it might be their last opportunity to see him.
When the end did finally come, the deliverer of Elvis's last pack of drugs on the evening before his death was neither a shady pusher nor one of his compliant doctors but his elderly aunt Delta, who was simply playing her part in the mad, cosy domestic routine which had developed round the master of the household and which no one dared break.
source:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/incomingFeeds/article772387.ece
Of the mass of books on Elvis Presley which have appeared since his death, very few give a real picture of what actually happened to him. All that distinguishes one from another is the degree to which the writers - his hairdressers, his secretary and a psychic - exaggerate their closeness to the King and the detail they decide to give of the horrors and weirdness of his life. Recent titles include Elvis Speaks from the Beyond and Elvis: The last 24 hours, a typical passage of which might run for several pages on the "impacted material" in Elvis's bowels and the long warm baths which he took as improvised enemas to get rid of it. The first volume of Peter Guralnick's biography of Elvis, which covered the years from his birth until his entry into the army in
1958, was a small island of truth in this sea of conjecture and bile. Careless Love, the second volume, completes the story up until his death in 1977. In his desire to get at the truth, Guralnick does touch on the lurid side of things but not for sensationalist reasons, only because it was, in fact, a large part of his subject's life. Otherwise, the only impacted material the reader comes across in this volume is the dense ream of facts with which Guralnick backs up his account. He quotes liberally from interviews with, and books by, Elvis intimates, which are full of strong opinions, but Guralnick himself is loath to force any particular thesis on to his work or describe what he thinks might have happened. Facts are everything. This sometimes makes for heavy reading, as he examines every single contract signed and every Cadillac driven (or given) away, but one's overwhelming impression is that this too often trivialized man has found his serious biographer.
And, it seems, quite often the other books were right. Elvis did develop some unhealthy habits. He liked to watch young girls in white knickers wrestling - a legacy of his childhood, he admitted, when he tussled with a friend in his backyard and caught a glimpse of her underwear. That childhood, his mother's love, and her death (on the same day in August that her son died and at the same age - forty-two - as the conspiracy theorists remind us) were guiding forces for the rest of his life. He liked to talk in baby language to his girlfriends, and they would play mother back to him. In a way, he was frozen in childhood for ever, or more particularly in adolescence: up all night, asleep all day; endless television watching, sleeping and eating broken by sporadic reading of spiritual books; a constant desire for fun, satisfied by fireworks, fairgrounds and go-kart-riding; a keen interest in the opposite sex; and half-gallon jars full of drugs.
The intriguing thing about all these habits is how early they started - by the late 1950s and early 60s this nocturnal child's life was in place, and, at that stage, he was certainly not in terminal decline. In fact, despite John Lennon's much quoted "Elvis Presley died the day he joined the army", it is striking how Elvis, even as his star faded after the massive explosion of his 1956 debut, managed to produce peaks of fame right up until 1973. There were bleak patches - between 1965 and 1969 he had no million-selling singles. But his leather-clad comeback television special was the number one show in 1968, and it catapulted him into the Las Vegas appearances which remained the greatest star attraction at the casinos until his death; he was never eclipsed by Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin orBarbra Streisand. That final peak in 1973, the Aloha from Hawaii special, was, at the time, the most watched live programme ever. And this was seventeen years after his debut. Are there any pop stars from 1982 who could today pull in a billion viewers for a concert of their old songs?
The other notable conclusion from Guralnick's set of impeccable facts is (despite the weirdness) the stability and conservativism of Elvis's domestic life. If one were to attempt to prescribe the best way for a star to survive the highs and lows of public adulation, one might make the following suggestions: remain in your home town, surround yourself with family and friends and do not fail for fickle showbiz acquaintances. Elvis did exactly that: his father and grandmother, who both outlived him, shared a house with him throughout his life. His aunts, uncle and double first cousins all lived in trailers stationed around his home. Constantly protecting him was a close-knit circle of friends, the so-called Memphis Mafia, a group of cronies much maligned for their mixture of sycophancy to and vilification of their boss. But they were friends of very long standing. Some had been at school with him; some in the army. Most of them were still around, twenty years later, when Elvis finally collapsed on the toilet; his gold pyjamas around his feet, apparently immersed in a study of sex and psychic energy which correlated sexual positions with astrological signs. The members of this circle were there day and night (and as a result can give unusually detailed biographical information); they provided the security blanket of like-minded company that Elvis seemed always to need.
Elvis himself was deeply conservative (small and big c). He watched Patton dozens of times and succeeded in meeting Patton's colleague General Omar Bradley and Vice President Spiro Agnew. On a visit to Richard Nixon in the White House in 1971, he offered his services as a special agent against "the Drug Culture, the Hippie Elements . . . . Black Panthers etc". During a failed attempt to see J. Edgar Hoover, he explained to a FBI agent that "his long hair and unusual apparel were merely tools of his trade" and "that the Beatles laid the groundwork for many of the problems we are having with young people by their filthy unkempt appearances and suggestive music". Add to this his dedicated army service, his obsession with the police, his chivalrous politeness to women and his elders, the liberal use of "sir" and "madam" in his conversations, and one ends with a picture of a Southern Conservative adolescent.
But old-fashioned values and long-standing friendships could not prevent the impending disaster. The conclusion that the Memphis Mafia, the girlfriends and the family all come to is the obvious one, that the man in the street who has not had the benefit of Guralnick's 700 pages on the subject would come to too - "Well, it was the drugs, wasn't it?" Elvis missed his mother. Fame went to the head of this originally modest, polite and intelligent man, and he became an insufferable boss to his friends. That mixture of sycophancy and vilification is not surprising in friends who are kept on a payroll and then continually sacked and rehired. His career was in the doldrums when he died. Yet all these elements and various combinations of them had happened earlier too. But the drug habit, that Elvis had begun by taking uppers in order to stay awake after night exercises in the army, kicked into full swing in 1973, and then it was simply a matter of time until the end came. His bodyguards grew used to lifting his comatose head out of soup bowls. Reviewers of his concerts began to opine that fans continued to go to his increasingly execrable performances only because they feared it might be their last opportunity to see him.
When the end did finally come, the deliverer of Elvis's last pack of drugs on the evening before his death was neither a shady pusher nor one of his compliant doctors but his elderly aunt Delta, who was simply playing her part in the mad, cosy domestic routine which had developed round the master of the household and which no one dared break.
source:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/incomingFeeds/article772387.ece