Before going to work, Elvis rings his valet and junk-food guru, Hamburger James. After a midnight snack — $ioo worth of Fudgesicles – Elvis consumes a pound of Dixie Cotton bacon, four orders of mash with gravy, plus lots of sauerkraut and crowder peas.
He sleeps in diapers these days, thick towels pinned round his middle. He weighs over 18 stone.
This is a modern biography, so we now follow Elvis from the bedroom to the bathroom. Not that Elvis can get there under his own steam: a bodyguard has to carry him. The bulb-studded sanctum is full of devotional literature, high-powered laxatives, and the King’s special ‘medication’ — i.e., his drugs. Elvis hates drug-addicts; he would like to see them herded into concentration camps. He once had an audience with Nixon, offering himself as a figurehead in the battle against dope. He was stoned at the time. In fact, he is a drug-addict. His doctor must delve between his toes for an unpopped vein.
In his six-door Batmobile Elvis leads the motorcade to Memphis Airport. His private plane, like his house, is a kitsch nightmare of velvet and plastic. At dawn the Lisa Marie (named after Elvis’s daughter) lands at Las Vegas. Waiting limos ferry the party to the Imperial Suite of the Hilton International. Elvis is cranked down into sleep. ‘Mommy, I have to go to the bathroom!’ he tells his girlfriend. ‘Mommy will take you.’ He sleeps. He is cranked awake. He eats, with a handgun beside his plate.
Bandaged and ‘braced’ — i.e., corseted — Elvis dons an outfit embroidered with the crowned head of King Tutankhamun and buckles his $10,000 gladiator’s belt. He stumbles and mumbles through his act, climaxing with his ‘American Trilogy’: ‘Dixie’, ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’, ‘All My Trials’. He comes off stage pouring with sweat and screaming for his medication. Soon he is back in his tomb, vowing that never again will he play ‘this fuck’n’ Vegas’.
Elvis: What Happened?, published just before Presley’s death, was the first expose, cobbled together by a couple of sacked goons. Since then, everyone has blabbed. Well, what did happen? How did Elvis’s life, like his voice, turn from energy and innocence into canting, parodic ruin? Goldman’s answer is that the whole phenomenon was corrupt and farcical from the beginning. ‘There is’, he warns, ‘absolutely no poignance in this history.’
Elvis’s family were hillbillies, ‘a deracinated and restless race’. Elvis’s father Vernon, ‘greedy and stupid’, ‘a dullard and a donkey’, was clearly a fine representative of the breed. Elvis was ‘a silly little country boy’ who just happened to be able ‘to sing like a nigger’, the ‘acne-spotted self-pity’ of his early songs making a strong appeal to ‘the hysterically self-pitying mood of millions of teenagers’.
Nursing dreams of becoming a new Valentino, Elvis’s real ambition was to become a movie star. Soon ‘the biggest putz in the history of film-making’ was well established as ‘one of the ugliest and most repulsive presences on the American screen’. When this bubble burst, he settled for the Vegas routine. The audience was ideal, consisting of ‘a couple thousand middle-aged people sated with food and drink’.
Personally Elvis was always ‘a momma’s boy’, a bully, a coward and a fool. His career as ‘pervert’, ‘voyeur1, ‘masturbator’, and so forth, was predictable as early as 1956, when Goldman pictures him ‘thrusting his fat tongue into the mouth of a backstage groupie’. Finally, the ‘freak’, the ‘pig junkie’, completes his ‘deterioration into homicidal madness’.
It quickly becomes clear — does it not? — that Goldman isn’t to be trusted. In his palpable eagerness to explode the Presley Myth, he has erected an anti-myth to replace it — which, in turn, is already being whittled away at by transatlantic commentators. It may indeed be the case that Elvis was no more than a horrible, and horribly uncomplicated, embodiment of American Success; but Elvis leaves us none the wiser.
In biography, displays of such inordinate aggression leave one wondering about the personal problems of the author rather than the subject. I read Elf is under the impression that Goldman was a surly young iconoclast of the Rolling Stone school of New Journalism. On the back flap I am confronted by a middle-aged chipmunk who used to be Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia. As should by now be evident, the book is a prodigy of bad writing, excitable, sarcastic and barely literate. It is also as exploitative as the exploiters whom Goldman reviles, and no more tasteful than a Presley pants-suit.