“I rest my case. Priscilla and the Memphis Mafia had a major power struggle.”
“And she won, because Elvis is dead and she’s running Graceland.”
“Especially interesting when you realize that Elvis left her out of the will and left everything to Lisa Marie.” “Then how did she—?”
“Lisa Marie was a minor when Elvis died, that’s how. She gets nothing out of it, just builds an inheritance for Lisa Marie.”
“Who married Michael Jackson.” Temple shook her head. “Another victim of rock ‘n’ roll.”
“Lisa Marie or Michael?”
“One, or both. I don’t care!”
“It really makes sense that she married him, you know. He led the lifestyle her father did: the forced isolation from fans, turning his home into an eternal playground, renting amusement parks to entertain his family and friends.”
“Why did they both do that? Too much time and money?”
“Too much fame, and too many fans everywhere they went. They needed the entourage to beat off the fans. They couldn’t go to public places to enjoy themselves. They had to become isolated and make their own worlds. And everybody around them got hooked on the idea.”
“Sometimes being ordinary is a boon, isn’t it?”
“Being ordinary is always a good place to hide,” Electra said, nodding. “Now. Can I go along to see all the Elvi? Please, Mommy, puh-lease?”
Who could turn down a whining sixty-seven-yearold teenager? Not Temple.
“Sure,” she said. “Friends and relatives of the performers are always hanging around the dressing rooms and house during rehearsal. Welcome aboard, and consider yourself a preview audience.”
Chapter 27
Where Do I Go from Here
(Recorded in a 1972 session where producer Felton Jarvis fought Elvis’s depression and torpor)
The King was feeling restless.
He knew he should be out there, performing.
The times they were a-changing.
Other performers were catching up to him. In the early days, he had the whole stage to himself. No rivals.
But then he had to leave home, leave his family, go off to a far place, and prove himself all over again in a new role.
There, he was supposed to blend in. You’re in the army now. Be a regular guy. It would be dangerous to stand out. Just be the same, simple, polite country boy everyone from Ed Sullivan to the general press had taken a shine to when they weren’t blasting him for being a scandalous influence on the youth of America. An aw-shucks, apple-polishing country bumpkin.
He wasn’t as simple as they thought, never had been. First in his family to finish high school. That meant a lot to hismama. She hadn’t liked him striking out on his own after high school much, or some of the people he’d gotten mixed up with. Traveling people. Drinking people. Girl-chasing people. But that came with the lifestyle, and, heck, he’d enjoyed those first deep breaths of freedom. He wasn’t the high-school loner anymore. He was the man with the power. Every guy wanted to be his friend. Every girl wanted to be his girl. Man, those were the days. Nobody worried about AIDS or anything serious. Everybody just had fun, staying up all night.
After all, his new career called for late hours, so why not party the whole night through? And, heck, he’d always had nightmares and would try to walk away from them … right down the road from the little house in Tupelo. Mama had kept him sleepin’ by her until he was twelve, though he’d figured out not to mention that much, or how she walked him to high school every day. No wonder the hoods tried to beat him up, especially when he started wearing his hair long before anyone had even dreamed of the Beatles.
But once he broke free, he knew just where to go for inspiration. Music first, then Lansky’s second, where the colored rhythm-and-blues singers bought their fancy duds. Before he knew it, he was on the road, and that’s when he discovered girls as a lot more than a prom date. He never stopped discovering girls. That’s what he liked, the discovering.
His mama, she about had a fit. She’d always doted on him when she wasn’t raking him over the coals for some misdeed or other. Now here he was off with strange men, meeting strange women who really, really wanted to meet him, and more. Then when that army thing came up, he was gone far, far away, like he’d been kidnapped or something, from her point of view. Taken away. Over Jordan, only this river was an ocean.
He knew deep in his heart that his mama just feared for him out in that big, funky, weird world. She grieved for him so. And it killed her. He knew that. In some ways she was right. It was way more dangerous out there than he had thought. But it was dangerous in here, too, Mama, he told her for the hundredth time. He talked to her sometimes, yeah, but it was like talkin’ to a dead twin. Kinda natural, after all, to talk to someone who was that close for that long. You’d think people could understand his losses. Uncles and aunts and cousins dyin’ left and right. He always said please and thank you, like she taught him, and sir and ma’am. These were words of respect, and you got to respect other people no matter who you are. Or were.
Ma’am is just Mama moved around.
The King sighed. Mama had moved around plenty in her lifetime. From Mississippi to Memphis, Tennessee. From one mean little house to another. There was no phone or running water in the house where he was born and Jesse Garon had died, or maybe had been born dead. He wasn’t sure which. He just knew that he sometimes could hear Jesse’s voice, so far away it sometimes seemed inside himself. He had a lot more inside himself than anyone gave him credit for, even when they were heaping praise or blame on him.
There were many times when he got tired of it all, when the music seemed the farthest thing from the center of his life.
First they couldn’t say enough good things about him. Then they couldn’t say enough bad. He just never really got taken seriously. They even made fun of his fans. And it was worst after his … collapse, when he had to leave his world and disappear.
Then all the books came out saying how strange he had been, from what he ate to how he slept with girls to how he played, even his spiritual aspirations. He was the butt of the whole world. And they never saw, never could or would see that everything he did, everything he became, came about because of the life he lived, because his fans loved him so much they could have almost torn him apart. And, in the end, maybe they had.
But they were keepin’ the legend alive now, for good or ill. Whether he wanted to get up, get dressed up, and go out and do it again, or not. Whether he could carry around this ole body anymore, or not.
They kept him movin’, that’s the truth.
The King got up from the bed, went to the wall of closetsand began sliding mirrors away from his own image, until he confronted racks of pale ghosts: an endless row of empty, glittering jumpsuits.
Which one tonight? Which one was fit for a King? Which one was fit for a King to go out and die in?
Chapter 28
Don’t Be Cruel (to a Heart That’s True)
(Elvis fell in love with this 1955 Otis Blackwell song; it was the first of three of his recordings that were number one on all three charts: country, pop, and rhythm and blues)
Matt was beginning to hate his new job.
Every Midnight Hour was now a suspense show: Would “Elvis” call or not? And when? Matt couldn’t help bracing himself for each new caller, breathing relief when it was just some ordinary person on the line, yet feeling a frisson of disappointment deep within. Was he becoming hooked on celebrity too? Or was something else going on here? He understood that he had a cohost now. A ghost cohost. Everyone in the studio mimicked his own cool excitement. Pros under pressure, loving and hating it. All performance was a two-edged sword that way, and Elvis’s weapon of choice had been particularly sharp because of his extreme fame and fans.