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Foreword

Dead Man Walking

He was born during the Depression in a two-room shack, in Tupelo, Mississippi, a surviving twin and a hillbilly, into a family lineage of poverty, alcoholism, and little more than barely getting by.

He became the world’s most well-known, wealthy, and successful entertainer.

An eternal adolescent reared by a passive father and a mother both doting and domineering, he was a lonely mama’s boy who believed in work and the golden rule, who dreamed of performing but had been conditioned to expect pampering.

He was the first in his family to graduate from high school, a hyperactive, nervous outsider, a boy whose love of religion and music would lead him to identify with black culture in a segregated South before the sixties’ Civil Rights movement.

He was a shrewd, intelligent, magnetic performer, who created his own image as an international singing star and sex symbol by blending two socially segregated traditions of music, black and white, into the worldwide phenomenon of rock ‘n’ roll.

He was modest, polite, generous, and even tender, a young man who won the eternal loyalty of men and women who knew him, and millions who didn’t.

From the outset, his meteoric career defied all odds, and accelerated his utter destruction on all fronts.

From the outset, the seeds of addiction were sown in his dysfunctional upbringing and a borrowed fistful of his mother’s diet pills, then a handful of Dexedrine tablets in the Army, then the live performer’s night-is-day Draculian lifestyle, and finally pills by the literal gallon from an array of “feel-good” doctors.

In his early twenties, death would separate him from his adored mother Gladys, leaving in her place Colonel Tom Parker, the controlling personal manager and ex-carnival hustler who would indenture his young property into servitude in low-grade films, confine him to songs that enriched the pockets but not the soul, and finally send him sick and sick at heart into years of relentless touring, all to underwrite the Colonel’s elephantine ego and eventual million-dollar gambling debts.

His performing career became a manic-depressive’s endurance contest as his obsessive personality dove into toys, girls, and pills in the face of boredom and fatigue. The Colonel quashed all attempts by him and others to revitalize his career. After the entertainer’s death, estate lawyers would strip Parker of control, but the estate didn’t have the deep pockets to reclaim millions from a manager who shamelessly took the lion’s share of his financially unsophisticated sole client’s enormous income.

Dogged by Parker’s soulless management, drugged by the side-effects of fame and prescribed uppers and downers, pursued and isolated by fans, he became an egocentric monster who indulged in spasms of compulsive generosity and grandiose mysticism behind a protective circle of flunkies and thugs, within a rotating harem of dozens of young, pliable women from whom he craved cuddles rather than sex.

By many accounts, he was the most charismatic performer ever to take the stage, a singer whose moves to the music mesmerized his audiences into an orgasmic love feast. By all accounts, during the last two of his forty-two years on earth, he was a dead man walking, self-medicated into a stumbling parody of himself, lost in a self-destructive stupor.

Finally, shortly after three of his once-loyal inner cir¬cle published a tell-all book revealing his eccentricities and drug abuse, enter ignominious death. He was found dead in 1977, age forty-two, in his bathroom, autopsied (drug abuse was denied as a cause of death then), and buried in Cadillac state amid a fan outpouring of hysterical grief.

He left everything to his only daughter, but on his father’s death two years later, his ex-wife became executor and tried to redeem the careless losses of the past with post-mortem merchandising. Under her management team, the home he’d bought in the first fever of success, Graceland in Memphis, Tennessee, became a mélange of unofficial national monument, tourist Mecca, and shrine that attracted fans from all over the world. Disneyland for a dead rock star.

His fans never deserted him. His genuine talent, charisma, and generosity outweighed his tragic flaws. The contradictions he embodied in larger-than-life fashion are the common mysteries of life, death, and human personality, but to conventional society, he had always been a threat and a joke, from his rural rocker beginnings to his overblown Las Vegas lounge-act end. Big names in music like Bob Dylan and John Lennon had always credited him for the birth of rock ‘n’ roll even while many black musical artists accused him of co-opting their musical thunder. Now revisionist rock history has enhanced his performing reputation. A video and book industry memorializes him to this day, for good or ill. Supermarket tabloids report people sighting him here and there. His songs have sold millions and millions and continue to sell.

Exit the man who was born to be Fate’s most famous dead man walking. Still walking.

Enter the fabulously flawed legend that won’t die. Enter the King.

Prologue

The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll

The King was getting a bad feeling, the way his mama used to sometimes.

She’d been right about the Colonel.

Beware the blue-eyed woman.

Huh! She’d been damn right about that one.

Look at Cilla, running the whole shootin’ match at Graceland now. Who’da thought that pretty little thing would turn out to be tougher than ‘em all, in the end? ‘Course, he’d raised her up. And if there was a lot he’d sheltered her from bein’, there was a lot he didn’t shelter her from seein’, maybe just to learn what not to do.

Taking Care of Business was an okay motto, but all Cilla had wanted then was TLC. That’s what all the King’s men and women got: gold bracelets and necklaces reading TCB for the guys, TLC for the girls. He was good at handing out the trinkets. But the fact was he’d never been any damn good at TCB, anyway. He just let his father Vernon run things, or not run things, and let the Colonel take over. Anybody walking in off the street wantin’ to do-for him was welcome, then they’d take-from … hell, if he’da known, he should have given Cilla the TCB job. Woulda given her something to do at Graceland’sides bitchin’ about his boys … and his girls.

‘Course she had something to work with when she took over. Bein’ dead does a lot to raise certain people’s stock. Look at JFK. Or Marilyn. Man, he never met her, and she was a little old for him and a little fat (look who’s talkin’). Didja see her in Let’s Make Love, where they were spoofing his sudden fame in a musical routine? One hot number. Not the delicate, dark-haired type he loved. Still, that woulda been something. But it ain’t over till it’s over, you know? Lookin’ back does no damn good. The tell-all books and coffee-table picture books and the movies and videotapes and miniseries and the special edition watches and the pink, white, and blue trinkets; they do the talkin’ nowadays. TCB.

Only one who hasn’t been heard from on the grand glory days and sad last nights of Elvis Aaron Presley is the King his own self. And even that isn’t impossible. Heck, all the King’s men had mostly used ghost writers to get their side of things down on paper.

And here he was one.

The King laughed, staring at the two silent-running TV sets tilted like gaming consoles into the green Naugahyde ceiling above him in the blacked-out bedroom. He shot the remote at them in turn, revving up the sound, speeding through channels, past reruns of old movies featuring dead pals and girlfriends. But some of them were still alive and kicking, his ex-buddies, ex-babes, ex-hangers-on.