The Incredible Vanishing Act of an American Icon

I could tell you that Elvis Presley, along with Jesus and John Wayne, was one-third of the holy trinity of my childhood. I could tell you that one of my earliest memories (aside from the Watergate hearings, which seemed to exist for the sole purpose of knocking cartoons off TV) was when the Cunninghams from down the road came back from a Hawaiian vacation and mesmerized everyone at church by describing Elvis in the flesh at a concert they’d seen and how I thought the Cunninghams were the most glamorous people I knew (also because they had a shower in their bathroom, a rarity in that part of Oklahoma at the time). I could tell you that even though my mother made sure us kids heard three sermons a week, she still knew all the words to “One Night” and “Suspicious Minds.” I could tell you that Elvis Presley’s death was the first time I shed tears for a public figure. And I could tell you that even now, after getting rid of Jesus and getting over John Wayne (my sister was the one with the teddy bear named “Duke,” not me), after plowing through so many towns and jobs and people, that “One Night” and “Suspicious Minds” are just about the oldest friends I have left.

I could tell you such things so you would know whose side I’m on. Because reading Peter Guralnick’s biography “Careless Love” will be complicated for Presley partisans. All that “I (Heart) Elvis” business wasn’t a lick of help to me. In fact, just the opposite. To anyone who cares about Elvis--what he meant, what he continues to mean--reading Guralnick’s painfully honest book is painful going but titillating at the same time. Like watching a horror movie, reading it is a physical experience, and I found myself gasping and flinching and looking away. Once or twice I heard myself say out loud, “Elvis, no.”

“Careless Love” is the second and final volume of Guralnick’s Presley bio, the follow-up to 1994’s “Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley.” Now there was a book an Elvis fan (and biographer, I’ll bet) found easy to love. Because the rise of Elvis Presley is one of the greatest--maybe the greatest--metaphors for the American Dream: rags to riches, pauper to prince, et cetera. Not to mention all the good-natured heroes he lucked into hooking up with early on: guitarist Scotty Moore, bassist Bill Black and visionary producer Sam Phillips. Besides the fact that the plot of “Last Train to Memphis” just went up, up, up, Guralnick’s prose had its usual quiet genius. Everyone, in short, was happy.

You don’t have to care about Elvis, though, to know how he ended up. And no matter how much you know, you can’t possibly guess at the intricate web of tawdry details, the excruciating stupidity, the megalomaniacal mistakes, the meta-sadness evident in the pages of “Careless Love.” Taking place from 1958 to 1977, the book shows Elvis in the Army; Elvis on pills; Elvis on buying sprees; Elvis robbing the cradle; Elvis as a bad actor, bad husband, bad boss, bad father, bad son, lousy lay. There is a brief relapse of genius in ‘68-’69. Then it’s back to bored Elvis, doped Elvis, divorced Elvis, joke Elvis, fat Elvis and, finally, dead Elvis.

Guralnick’s attention to detail is geometrically proportionate to Elvis’ capacity to screw up. So his 11 years of accumulated research, 11 years of countless interviews with hundreds of Presley principals and observers and hangers-on, 11 years of painstaking rearranging and writing and, one might guess, head-scratching and hair-pulling to scalpless result, have brought forth this, in Guralnick’s word, “tragedy.” Try “Judgment at Nuremberg” in which Elvis is both killer and killed.

A random sampling of testimony:

* A girlfriend on their romance: “It was adolescent--until all of a sudden you graduated into Mother.”

* Guralnick on spreading the love, among other things: “Back home in Memphis, Elvis split his pants bending over to kiss a fan.”

* Guralnick on Presley’s addiction: “With the Asheville dentist out of the room, and Dr. Nick watching, Elvis started going through cabinet drawers searching for pharmaceutical samples.”

* Girlfriend Linda Thompson on the final days: “One time in Las Vegas he was eating some chicken soup, and I went in the bathroom to get ready for bed. When I came back, his face was in the soup and he was almost suffocating.”

* And the coroner on his death: “It was certainly possible that he had been taken while ‘straining at stool.’ ”

Or there’s the time Elvis saw Joseph Stalin’s face in a cloud. Or the daily injections of Demerol. Or his numerous, hideous movies. (“I’ve never done a classic film,” he says, in the book’s most glaring understatement.) Or all the women, from Ann-Margret on down to Miss Traffic Safety. Or his overnight conversion to New Age philosophy (says Memphis Mafioso Joe Esposito, “We were having fun, and now all of a sudden Elvis is outside looking at the stars all night or reading these books . . . and asking questions about religion. Hey, what about the football game that happened last weekend?”). Or the inexplicable collection of law enforcement badges; hey, whatever happened to “Jailhouse Rock”?

In the hands of the wrong writer, such pitiful information, such degrading, pathetic anecdotes, could melt into racist, peanut butter-banana sandwich rhetoric. The end of Elvis could easily be lurid and laughed at and base. But here the demise is rendered human and epic all at once. Elvis is corporeal--a man who eats and sweats and defecates--and a disembodied voice. And what a voice, the author reminds you. Guralnick, the author of such classics on popular music as “Feel Like Going Home,” “Sweet Soul Music” and “Lost Highway,” is one of our best nonfiction writers. He’s also one of our most trustworthy citizens--inherently, defiantly decent. His voice is plain-spoken but elegant, holy without being holier-than-thou, reverent while recognizing his subject’s intrinsic irreverence. He’s listened to all the records, and listened hard, but he’s also felt them, thought them through. And no matter how bad it gets, which is to say, no matter how far Elvis falls, Guralnick never once forgets what drew him to his subject in the first place--”the voice that the world first heard on those bright yellow Sun 78s, whose original insignia, a crowing rooster surrounded by boldly stylized sunbeams . . . sought to proclaim the dawning of a new day.”

“Careless Love,” which clearly takes place at sundown, is a more staggering achievement than “Last Train to Memphis”--which is saying something. Though the first book was more lovable, it was also an easier story to tell. “Careless Love” requires guts from the author, a kind of relentlessness and no small amount of faith. As Guralnick puts it, “If the last part of Elvis’ life had to do with the price that is paid for dreams, neither the dreams themselves, nor the aspiration that fueled them, should be forgotten. Without them the story of Elvis Presley would have little meaning.”

There is only a handful of first-person detours in Guralnick’s epic. But still, you can always feel him sitting there, reacting to what he’s being told, trying not to frown, trying not to vomit. You can also feel his joy, his relief, when it’s finally 1968 and he lets himself fall back in love with Elvis, back in love with his voice. For ’68 is the so-called comeback year, the era of the Christmas television special in which director Steve Binder turned Elvis loose in black leather. Elvis, in turn, let loose. Guralnick, describing watching this on television, writes, “I don’t know if I can convey how truly thrilling a moment it really was--and, as much as the performance may have held up over the years, I’m not sure that it can ever be as thrilling again. In many ways I (and others like me) may well have been Steve Binder’s ideal viewers, as we read volumes into every gesture, strained to catch every aside, found justification at last for the hopeless faith that we had placed in the music.”

There it is, the hankie Guralnick must have held over his nose while wading through the rest of Elvis’ crap. Guralnick says of this music: “It is 1955 and 1956 all over again,” by which he might mean that Elvis has recaptured the freedom of his youth. Not that, for the fan, there’s any need to choose between 1955 and 1968, but there are ways in which the music of ’68 is better. Because in ’68 there was more at stake. Elvis had lost so much and had so much to lose. He was nervous and needy and desperate to impress. He was back on stage with Scotty Moore and not, as he said of his movies, “singing to turtles.” And even though it’s a fool’s game to get into the age issue with regard to rock ‘n’ roll, there’s something an older man, a recently married man, an about-to-be-divorced man, can bring to Jimmy Reed’s “Baby What You Want Me to Do” that a teenager can’t.

Even though Guralnick is uncertain whether the music Elvis made for the TV special “can ever be as thrilling again,” there is a way in which reading this massive narrative has made me love that music even more. Because now it seems not only more remarkable, it seems all the more unlikely. Thanks to Guralnick’s meticulous portrait of Elvis’ laziness and addiction and sloth, the fact that Mr. Seven Deadly Sins got it together enough to create some of the funniest and bravest and sexiest art of his career comes across as even more of a miracle. Of course, there are 300 pages after this to witness what the author calls “the vanishing of Elvis Presley,” but at least you have something to remember him by.