Interviews
The King Is Dead; Long Live the King!
Edward Hutchinson, who previously discussed the life and career of Frank Sinatra with author Pete Hamill for barnesandnoble.com, now explores the meteoric rise and tragic fall of the King of rock 'n' roll in a conversation with Peter Guralnick, author of Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley, the follow-up to the award-winning first volume of his two-volume biography, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley.
barnesandnoble.com: The subtitle of Careless Love is "The Unmaking of Elvis Presley." Can you give us the short version of what that "unmaking" consisted of, and why you chose that word?
Peter Guralnick: Well, I wanted it to be a fairly neutral title, not one that assigned or suggested blame. So it's meant to suggest the unraveling of a life. A life and, in a sense, an image as well. But this is not to point a finger at anyone.
bn: Anyone who's read Last Train to Memphis, the first volume, would know that you're going to give as balanced and fair a picture of the second half of Elvis's life as humanly possible. But there's no getting around the fact that this is unavoidably a depressing subject.
PG: Right, it is.
bn: So why, frankly, should someone read this very detailed account of those years?
PG: Well, I don't think any life is a cautionary tale as such. We all end up the same way. But I think that a life is worth telling when it centers around a dramatic story, or, as this one does, around a great aspiration, a breadth of outlook and an imaginative and creative grasp that far exceeds anything that could have been expected, considering the background that Elvis came from. I see it as a tragic story, in that you see someone of great gifts brought down, in some measure, by those very gifts. You see someone whose charm, whose ability to persuade others, ultimately blinds him to seeing the truth about his own life. But I say that without judgment. It seems to me that this is the stuff of any form of tragedy. But it's the aspiration of Elvis's life and the great scope of his work that gives us reason to study it. All of it.
bn: How would you compare writing the second volume to writing the first? Was it harder?
PG: It was harder, but not so much in terms of the story there was to tell; obviously, if I had control over how the story came out, I wouldn't have designed this ending, but from the standpoint of writing about it, this would be like saying Chekhov should have written only happy stories. What was more difficult about writing the second volume was that in the first, the external events mirror the inner story. Elvis's triumph, the story of his success, mirrors his hopes, his dreams. In the second volume, if you were to take the external record, you would end up simply talking about, well, he was making "Blue Hawaii" now, and then he made "Follow That Dream," and later on "Spinout"and it doesn't reflect in any way what's really going on inside Elvis, who really had higher ambitions. So in the second volume it was really much more about finding a way to tell the story from the inside out, as much as possible.
bn: One thing about your treatment of the story is that you steer very clear of psychoanalyzing or diagnosing Elvis. That's a temptation few writers seem able to resist.
PG: Yeah, I think those things represent a trivialization of the subject, an oversimplification. I think that if anyone could really understand other people in that way, if we could really reduce human beings to those terms, then those people who could do it would lead nothing but happy lives, there would be no divorce, no troubles. And since that has never been the case for anybody, I think the real task is to try to understand the full complexity of a life. You could spend a lifetime of your own trying to understand it, and you might not, but I think that's a more fruitful avenue of exploration than trying to reduce people to butterflies pinned on a board.
bn: One of the great things about Last Train to Memphis was how you avoided mythologizing the younger Elvis. I would think in the latter part of the life, the great temptation would be to diagnose.
PG: Well, again, I really wanted to present Elvis as a living person. For instance, when he went to Washington to meet President Nixon and request a Bureau of Narcotics badge, I wanted to describe the context in which this took place as truly and accurately as if it were an everyday one. All the factors that went into that incident make it both more surreal and more real. But you can't tell that story truly without showing how his growing fascination with badges and guns grew out of an assassination threat in Vegas, which he took very seriously. And how he came to be fascinated with acquiring this badge from meeting a Hollywood actor through a private investigator that he'd hired as a result of a paternity suit. And his friendship with General Omar Bradley, a neighbor at the time. All of these things formed the context for his trip to Washington. And while all of these were anecdotes with which I was familiar, before writing the book they were free-floating. They weren't connected to a time or place, and when I recognized the sequence in which these things happened, I felt that I could portray the events. You don't have to portray them soberlyit can be both comic and serious, or simply comicbut I could portray them a lot more truly.
bn: The first volume ends, very dramatically, with Elvis sailing off to his Army stint in Germany, with thousands of fans lining the dock, but no one knowing whether or not his career will survive a two-year absence. The second volume begins with that overseas period. Did you find that his personality changed during this time?
PG: I did, and I never anticipated this, I expected that the change would show up considerably later. And in fact, if I were dictating the story, I would have had the change take place much more slowly, to develop the dramatic arc. But I think he did become a distinctly different person. And people like Red West and Lamar Fike, who were over there with him, described the change.
bn: It seemed as if he very quickly became more angry, more self-protective, more intent on showing his macho side to the world.
PG: It seems to me that the Army put him in a period of severe dislocation, a real loss of confidence in himself and in his faith. Now, to some extent, that had to do with his mother's death, which was terribly traumatic for him. But I think it also had to do with his being, for the first time, in the company of strangers who didn't have his best interests at heart. He grew up as an only child, a cherished only child, who was loved without any holding back by his parents. He was the kind of kid who you could imagine never having spent a night away from home when he was growing up. Now here he is, living among strangers who have made it very clear that they're waiting to see him fail, and he himself is desperate to succeed, both to confound their expectations and to live up to his own. And this may be oversimplifying, but I think it was at this point that he created the persona of "Elvis Presley," or perhaps I mean, of "ELVIS." Before he went into the Army, as insecure as he was in some ways, he was pretty freewheeling, pretty confident of the inner accord that existed, and here all of a sudden, he's afraid that everything he's worked for is going to be taken from him. His mother's just died; he's afraid that the fans will drift awayI'm not simply speculating here; this is all on the recordand he creates, out of desperation almost, this persona.
bn: You have a second main character in this book who's also a very enigmatic and controversial manColonel Tom Parker. Would it be fair to say that it was while Elvis was in the Army that their relationship really got cemented into the form it would take for the rest of Elvis's career?
PG: Hmm. Well, I think that you can look at this period to see how close a relationship it really was. I mean, you can look at the last few years of Elvis's life and ask how he ever could have stayed with the Colonel, because the business deals are very one-sided in those last few years. But you can't paint this time in the same way. While Elvis is in the Army, and when he is most needful of reassurance and support, the Colonel, who was deluged with opportunities to take up other artists' careers, sticks exclusively with Elvis, and works assiduouslynot simply to make money, because he could have made a lot more money in other waysto build up Elvis's confidence, to give him a sense that he has a career to come home to. And I think it's there, in the almost daily letters he writes to Elvis, the constant telephone calls, where you can see the closeness, the genuine affection between them.
bn: And yet, it also seems as if that was when the Colonel put the arrangements in place that would lead towell, the crappy-movie years from '62 to '67.
PG: Well, to an extent. I mean, the Colonel wants to give him a career to come back to, and that career is in the movies, and both of them want that. And you have to be understood that the second and third movies he makes after he comes home are the kinds of straight dramatic roles that Elvis always wanted to play, and there are other points where the Colonel tries to find those kind of roles for him. So it's not quite as simple a story as people usually take it to be. But neither is it completely different. What happens is, that after Elvis gets out of the Army, what he and the Colonel and [producer] Hal Wallis aim to do is to make a kind of Bing-Crosby-for-the-60s stardom, which would legitimate Elvis for a broader audience. It's an understandable goal, but at first it wasn't the only goal. Unfortunately, with the success of Blue Hawaii, the Colonel's instinct that the movies and the records should support each other is borne out beyond anybody's expectations. The soundtrack album just sells geometrically more than any of the studio albums Elvis has made. So with the Colonel's instinct corroborated in this way, the next five years are spent carrying it out to the limit. Soon Elvis is recording only soundtrack music, and the music is supporting the movies and the movies are supporting the musicthe Colonel's Pleistocene version of MTV.
bn: Then Elvis stays in that rut for a while, apparently bored to distraction, seeking diversion in a rowdy bachelor life with "the guys", in spiritual studies that don't seem to bring him a lot of peace, and a marriage that he seems to treat pretty casually. When we get to the '68 comeback, it's as if the sun has broken through the cloudsit's such a relief to see him doing work he believes in again.
PG: Well, in fact, as early as '66, Elvis comes out of a period of very bad moviemaking, andI don't want to say artistic bankruptcy, but artistic frustrationto make the very good gospel album How Great Thou Art, and that really signals the beginning of an artistic renaissance that goes on to include the '68 TV special, the American Studios sessions in '69, the opening in Las Vegas in '69, and then the Nashville sessions in '70 and '71, which are very creditable performances. Had that been the end of the story, people would have a very different view of Elvis Presley. It's unfortunate that people can't separate the Elvis at the end of his life from the Elvis of these five years, because you see someone with great artistic ambition and with very strong artistic achievements over a five-year period, far removed from his beginnings.
bn: And yet, after just a few years of that, he slides back into the final years of lost hopes and wasted talent. Why wasn't he able to sustain it?
PG: Well, I think then, the personal takes over, and from '73 on, you see somebody who is increasingly and severely depressed. I think that's the real story. You can say oh, it's because of the drugs, but I would say the drugs were a symptom of living under a crushing burden of depression. I think all anyone has to do to understand that is to think of someone they know who is depressed. You say, "Why doesn't this person act in a more rational way?" when the answer is: they're depressed.
If one had the capacity to give Elvis a gift, the two greatest gifts I think anybody could have given him would have been, one, a course in comparative religions at UCLAwhich he would have just loved, because he was fascinated by that and it would have satisfied a hunger which he genuinely felt. And the other would have been, well, therapy. But I think there's only one thing that would have done that for him, made him willing to do it. This is just a recent thought I had, but I think the fans were the only thing that could have gotten him to seek help. Because Elvis could not admit to error, he was terribly afraid of showing ignorance or doubt or vulnerability.
bn: --An aspect of the "Elvis" persona that, you said earlier, he created during that insecure time in the Army, perhaps?
PG: Yes, I think so. But you can see towards the end of his life, just before the beginning of his last scheduled tour, the one he never went out on, he's sitting with his cousin Billy Smith, and he's terribly worried about the effect of Elvis: What Happened, the book by his ex-bodyguards which is going to reveal everything about the drugs, the guns, everything he's tried to keep from the public, and he's terribly worried about the effect it will have on his daughter, his father, and the fans. And he's talking to Billy about "What am I going to do if the fans start yelling things?" and he goes through several scenarios. And the final one is, if they're not satisfied with his attempts to deflect the criticism, that he'll announce, "I know I've got a problem, and I'm going to get help. I'll get it straightened out at the end of this tour." I honestly believe that is the one thing that he would have responded to. I think Elvis saw himself getting his strength from the fans, in an almost mystical way.
bn: You know, thinking about his last few years and his manner of deathit may be almost literally the case that every American knows this story, even ones who never heard his early singles, who never responded to any of his work. Do you think the Gothic legend of his last years has enlarged his myth to even greater proportions and made the flesh-and-blood man, the one you write about, harder to see clearly?
PG: Yes, I think he's been turned into an archetype. You can see him either as an archetype of achievement or of tragedy, but either one makes it harder to see the living person, and that's the challenge in any biography. When Richard Ellmann writes about James Joyce, you want to see Joyce the working writer, you don't want to see the great symbol of the artist god, or whatever. Any time someone is made into a symbol, it makes it harder to feel the real story underneath, as it actually happened.
I mean, you never know when you're deluding yourself, but with everything I've ever written, I've looked for some sort of breakthrough into the inner story, whether it's writing about Bobby "Blue" Bland or Solomon Burke or Elvis Presley, the aim is the same; it's to feel the story, not simply to be flashing index cards, connecting the dots. So I came to feel that I knew Elvis as you would know a friend. But I'm not the one to judge my success or failure at communicating the story.