Foreword
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 mu- sical 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.
