Elvis Presley was as famous for his
personal style as for his music. In matters of taste, he was a true
fanatic, not satisfied with what was merely right or polite. He liked
everything he did to be the ultimate, the most, the richest, and the
best.
Propriety never constrained him. In the beginning, he was the kid with
pink Cadillacs, a gold lame suit, and greasy sideburns—so threatening to
good manners that his swiveling hips had to be censored out of the
picture when he sang on Ed Sullivan's television show. When he got rich,
he did not hire some snooty interior decorator to make his mansion look
like the home of someone with good taste; he personally went to one of
Memphis's tackiest furniture stores and created a Polynesian-themed
"Jungle Room" complete with running waterfall and colored lights.
Everything he did was extreme. He wore ermine capes, drove Harley
Davidson trikes (because he got too fat to balance on a two-wheeler),
ate bacon by the pound and banana pudding by the tub, and got addicted
to Feenamint laxative chewing gum. His extravagant life peaked in the
seventies at the Las Vegas Hilton in glittering performances that ranged
from "Hound Dog" to "My Way," and ended in death from heart failure
triggered by straining to overcome constipation while sitting on his
toilet.
At each stage of his career, Elvis had an unfailing ability to appall
and upset everybody except the tens of millions of fans who loved him
whatever he did. In the beginning, critics condemned his bump-and-grind
singing style as indecent. In the sixties, he caught hell for betraying
rock and roll to sing ballads and make a series of happy-go-lucky
Hollywood movies. And in the seventies, when he took his sound-and-light
musical revue on the road, he got blamed for being too slick and too
maudlin and not like he used to be. Elvis was always doing something
other than what he was supposed to do. If the role of art is to upset
the status quo, music has never known a truer artist than him.
When he was a living person, his voice was so inspired that many who
might otherwise have been exasperated by his behavior could always
excuse him as an idiosyncratic virtuoso. When he died, however, shocking
new levels of vulgarity turned the Elvis phenomenon from a story of
eccentric genius into the quintessential saga of bad taste, American
style.
The postmortem outrageousness began at his funeral, when the National
Enquirer snuck a photographer into the wake and nabbed a front-page
picture of Elvis lying in his coffin.
A few weeks later, three men were arrested for plotting to steal his
body from the Forest Hill Cemetery, where it had been buried. It was
later revealed that the grave-robbing story was a hoax, trumped up by
Elvis's father, Vernon, as a way to get Elvis's corpse dug up and
reinterred in the backyard of Graceland, where it would be safe (and
where it remains today).
Even before he died, Elvis had been picked at like buzzard's meat by
three former bodyguards who wrote a book called Elvis, What Happened?
(with National Enquirer reporter Steve Dunleavy), describing him as a
deranged junkie. Suddenly what had been a very private life was opened
up and pored over by sensationalizers who realized that Elvis was a gold
mine. In 1980 Albert Goldman came out with the exhaustively repulsive
Elvis, a compendium of scandal meant to discredit not only Elvis but his
family and his fans. Goldman plumbed never-before-tested depths of bad
taste in his painstakingly detailed descriptions of Elvis lying
semicomatose in a drug-induced stupor, and in comprehensive accounts of
his bowel habits.
Then came the impersonators Not content to merely idolize Elvis they
became him, some going so far as to have sideburn implants and plastic
surgery and take speech lessons from Memphis vocal coaches who taught
them how to mumble and stutter as Elvis did when he was nervous.
Virtually all impersonators become the Elvis of the seventies, because
it was then that Elvis attained his most kingly demeanor, both in
personal size (big) and in the folderol of his wardrobe and stage show.
Most don't really look like him, but that doesn't matter, because the
iconic Elvis has by now been reduced to a few basic and instantly
recognizable elements: sequined white jumpsuit with elephant bell
bottoms and a high collar with shoulder-wide wings, girder-sided silver
glasses, and masses of glittering rings on the fingers. Connoisseurs of
impersonatorology evaluate Elvis on the subtlest details: Do they wear
Brut cologne like Elvis did? Do they make their hair blue-black with
Clairol Black Velvet, his chosen brand of hair dye? The phenomenon of
men (and even some women and children) remaking themselves in his image,
and fans receiving these living effigies as avatars of Elvishood on
earth, has no precedents outside of arcane fetishistic religions.
When he was alive, there was always an embarrassment of riches in Elvis
souvenirs, including record albums containing scraps of his clothing,
Love Me Tender lipstick, and sweaty scarves that he threw into the
audience while singing, "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" Posthumous
exploitation includes liquor-decanter statuettes, memorial candles (to
be burned only on August 16, the anniversary of his death), vials of his
sweat, bags of dirt taken from the lawn of Graceland, scraps of rug
taken from the floors where he walked, Elvis-faced panty shields, and
virtually anything and everything he ever touched or even came near.
Exhibits in Elvis museums around America include his checkbook stubs,
his underwear, photocopies of his weekly shopping list, his electric
razor, and X-rays of his sinuses.
Those who don't believe he is actually gone have had a ghoulish heyday
spotting the undead man in the local Ę Mart or at a hamburger stand.
Some have seen him reborn in a cloud or in the blob inside their Lava
Lite. In 1989 the Weekly World News reported on a tribe of "wacky
savages" in Brazil who all wear Elvis wigs and perform tribal rituals
that involve beating on bongo drums and singing "Blue Suede Shoes." The
Elvis-worshipping natives were themselves not surprising; other
sensation-seeking newspapers have regularly told stories about
grass-skirted savages on Pacific islands who have been praying to Elvis
since he made his movie Paradise Hawaiian Style nearby in 1966. What was
startling about the Brazilians, according to Henri Bonjean, the French
anthropologist who discovered them, was that they claim to have been
visited by Elvis in 1981, four years after he was supposed to have died.
"He called himself King Elvis and strummed an old wooden guitar,"
Bonjean told the Weekly World News, which described the savages hopping
up and down and swiveling their hips when they sang.
There is some crazy logic in the trajectory of Elvis from teen idol to
the world's looniest lodestone of publicity. In the fifties, he
represented all the frightening indecencies of the emerging youth
culture, including but not limited to rock and roll. Critics said he
foreshadowed the end of Western civilization. Western civilization has
not yet ended, but to those forever worried about it going down the
tubes, the outrages of modern Elvisiana are exemplary symptoms. The king
of rock and roll has gone on to become the god of excess.
