The King Chronicles

Coming soon to a 7-Eleven near you--Elvis Presley! The King lives on, in myth, in mysterious sightings, in legions of pompadoured impersonators, on postage stamps, and in songs still played on jukeboxes and radios around the world. As a celebrity who graduated to the status of single-name cultural icon, Elvis’ immortality was assured.

There’s no new work to add to the recordings, movies and videotapes of concerts originated when America was younger and more innocent, when a juvenile delinquent sneer and suggestively vibrating hips were enough to convince Eisenhower-era protectors of public morals that rock ‘n’ roll was the devil’s anthem. Yet so enduring is his legacy, so alive his rich baritone, that it’s almost hard to believe that he died 21 years ago, a bloated, pitiful addict smothered in his own vomit on the shag-carpeted bathroom floor of Graceland, the gilded prison of his own making.

Peter Guralnick knows that Elvis is dead, just as he knows what time he died, who discovered the body and, seemingly, every other detail of Presley’s life and death. The final part of Guralnick’s exhaustive two-volume biography, “Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley” (Little, Brown & Co.), covering the years 1958 to 1977, was published earlier this year, and like the first volume, “Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley” (Little, Brown & Co., 1994), it has been widely praised as the definitive work on the legendary star.

“The story has been told before, but never so convincingly or with such an absence of glee or condescension,” Greil Marcus wrote in Esquire.

Several hours before a recent book signing and reading at Book Soup in West Hollywood, Guralnick is ensconced at the Chateau Marmont. The manager there knows Guralnick well, because in the 11 years the author spent intermittently following Elvis’ trail, he traveled to L.A. and Memphis, Tenn., many times from his Boston home. A 55-year-old novelist and music writer, Guralnick undertook researching Presley’s life with the same meticulousness he would have applied if he were writing the biography of a literary lion or a statesman. He was able to sustain his interest over the years because, he says, “I’m exploring a world, and I’m interested in every aspect of it. My intention is to locate Elvis in a time and place, and show the ways in which he’s affected by that time and place and the ways in which he affects it in turn. It’s really an attempt to understand a world that has different dimensions and many different characters and takes place on many different stages. I don’t see [Elvis’ story] as existing on a single plane.”

A Portrait of the Artist

A lover of American vernacular music, especially the blues, Guralnick admits that if he had a mission in writing the books, it was to bring people closer to Presley as a creative artist. As “Elvis went from leaving the building to being the building,” as comedian Dennis Miller put it, it became increasingly difficult for followers to separate his work from the indelible image of the dissipated, fallen demigod.

“That image is what people superimpose on the Elvis of many other periods, and it makes it difficult to respond freshly to the music,” Guralnick says. “That’s why I’m saying open up your ears and listen. There’s something there. There’s such a sense of spontaneity, such a sense of freedom in the expression of the voice and the expression of emotion, in Elvis’ most creatively fertile period.”

That golden age is commonly recognized as the mid-’50s, when Elvis recorded in Memphis, before his Army stint and long before Hollywood and his commercially wily manager, Col. Tom Parker, put him in a series of humiliating movies that spawned banal soundtracks. The magic was briefly recaptured in a 1968 television special when Elvis, in black leather, was again triumphant as a performer. A chapter in “Careless Love” on that TV show is one of the few in which the stench of Elvis’ galloping decay doesn’t permeate the pages.

He’s a Reporter, Not an Interpreter

Relaxing in his hotel suite, Guralnick enthusiastically shares his appraisal of Elvis’ work. But in “Careless Love,” he is deliberately stingy with judgments of his subject. His method follows the Latin phrase Res ipsa loquitur: The thing speaks for itself. Although he has written music criticism and smartly analytical liner notes, as a biographer, he is primarily a reporter. He sees his job as the accumulation and presentation of detail, from which readers will draw their own conclusions.

“What I want to do is construct a portrait of depth and complexity” without forcing an interpretation on the reader, he says.

Some conclusions are inescapable.

“Without my ever naming it, the description of Elvis [in the ‘70s] is of someone who could be seen as manic depressive,” he says. “I don’t believe that psychiatrists could go in today, look at the evidence and diagnose a person without ever having seen the person. But from a layman’s point of view, you see the symptoms of manic depression.” In his euphoric phases, Elvis would spend a lot of money, on himself and others. In 1975, he bought and gave away 14 Cadillacs in a day.

The wages of success included the power to challenge nature’s order. With a steady supply of heavy-duty depressants, painkillers and amphetamines, he controlled a universe in which night fell when he said so and the sleeping pills were served at his command, not when the sky darkened. Guralnick considers Elvis’ drug use a manifestation of clinical depression.

“I don’t see the drugs as being the cause of his problem at all,” he says. “They were a way of obliterating reality.”

Despite the fame and the fans, Elvis’ day-to-day existence wasn’t enviable. He was never without a phalanx of obedient, obsequious childhood buddies who, in their black mohair suits and sunglasses, came to be known as the Memphis Mafia.

“He was surrounded by friends and relatives, all dependent on him, all looking to him for help, for guidance, for handouts--for something. He could give them jobs, he could dispense money and favors, on the surface they all deferred to him, and he was clearly the one in charge--but in his darkest moments he suspected that it was all a masquerade. They were like bluebottle flies buzzing around a dung heap, with no more loyalty to him than a fly would feel,” Guralnick writes.

In 1972, a pair of filmmakers made a documentary of Elvis on tour. After one of the documentarians had spent some time with the star, he told Guralnick, “I realized with all of the musicians and bodyguards and sycophants around, that these guys had been around for 17 years now telling the same stories and jokes, and what kind of a life is this? And do I film it?”

Women, who came and went through metaphorical revolving doors at Elvis’ Memphis, L.A., Palm Springs and Las Vegas haunts, did little to relieve the tedium.

“When I interviewed Priscilla Presley,” Guralnick says, “she had an interesting perspective on the group around Elvis and her place in the group, the rules a woman had to play by and the way in which you played by those rules or you left.” One rule was to never expect fidelity from Elvis. But the many women who kissed the King related that he behaved more like a romantic teenager than a mature debaucher: He preferred kissing, petting and cuddling to sex.

Whole biographies have tried to make the case that an artist’s sexual preference dictates the approach to his art. In Guralnick’s view, the drugs, the entourage, the women are symptoms of Elvis’ fall, not the causes. The fact that his sexual style could be labeled immature is just a fact, not the key to his personality. The cliched analysis of his behavior with women would be that it stemmed from a fear of intimacy.

“Sure, and the cliche wouldn’t be altogether wrong,” Guralnick says. “I’m putting out a picture that supports the view of Elvis as being adolescent sexually or having a fear of intimacy. But the picture is more complex than just bringing it down to a one-line conclusion.”

Nor is there a single villain of the tale. Or perhaps, if there is, it’s not a person but, rather, the destructive effect of commercialism.

“The book is about the way in which creative effort is inevitably turned into a commodity,” Guralnick says. “At one time or another, every kid fears that they haven’t lived up to their potential. That’s a tragedy on a very finite level. If there are no ambitions, if there is no reach, then it’s hard to see a tragic resonance. But in Elvis’ case, his ambition was so vast, his hopes were so great, his achievements were so extraordinary in the beginning, that his falling away from what he felt he should be doing and the extent to which he disappointed himself makes the story a tragedy.”

The swaggering, macho star persona often supersedes that of the tragic hero in the popular imagination. Otherwise, why would someone like actress Yasmine Bleeth, who was a child when Elvis died, tell a talk show host, “I can never be interested in a guy unless he has a little Elvis in him”?

Guralnick has crafted a painfully accurate picture, yet the myths endure because, he says, “Elvis has become such an omnivorous symbol.”