Elvis Presley’s ’68 Comeback Special is in cinemas on 16 and 20 August. Now, 50 years on, Elvis Presley’s famed 1968 TV concert is getting a big-screen reboot, showing at select cinemas throughout USA and UK next week. A new generation of fans will be able to watch the King, wearing black leather and a tough look on his face, swagger his way through one of the best performances of his career. “It feels like only yesterday to me,” Steve Binder, 85, the show’s director, told the Observer. “Elvis went out on that stage cold. He hadn’t performed in eight years, and he’d had few hit records in that time. But he just went out there and did it. That was raw talent.”
The concert, in which Presley reeled off hit after hit, from Heartbreak Hotel to Love Me Tender, came at a crossroads in his career. Written off by many in the industry, he had been in what Binder described as “a creative exile”, making Hollywood movies under the notoriously authoritarian management of Colonel Tom Parker. “The colonel was all about power and his will over others,” Binder said. But it really only happened by accident: “When I took Elvis out to NBC to show him where we were actually going to shoot the show, he said, ‘Do you think it would be possible to put a bed in my dressing room?’” Source: www.theguardian.com
Following the Freddie Mercury biopic, “Bohemian Rhapsody”, which will be released in October, the King himself, Elvis Presley, is to be portrayed on the big screen. On hold since 2014, the project is likely to pick up speed now that director Baz Luhrmann intends to begin shooting in March 2019. As well as taking the director’s chair, Luhrmann (“The Great Gatsby”) will write the screenplay and act as producer. In his role as writer, he will take over from Kelly Marcel and Jeremy Donner, who were previously tasked with producing the script.
The film will be split into two parts focusing on different periods in the singer’s life. The first of these will focus on Elvis between the ages of 18 and 22, and the second will pick up his story at age 35. Casting director Kristy Carlson will be looking for two actors with a talent for singing, to play the role of the King whose wild dance moves sparked so much controversy in his day. The film will be the first major biopic to be entirely focused on an iconic celebrity of the 1950s. The information reported by Discussing Film has yet to be confirmed by Warner Brothers. Source: entertainment.inquirer.net
Beginning with Presley's army service in Germany in 1958 and ending with his death in Memphis in 1977, Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley chronicles the unravelling of the dream that once shone so brightly, homing in on the complex playing-out of Elvis' relationship with his Machiavellian manager, Colonel Tom Parker. Having mortgaged his talent to the machinations of his manager, 'Colonel' Tom Parker, there would be an inevitable price to pay. It's a breathtaking revelatory drama that places the events of an often mistold context. Elvis' changes during these years form a tragic mystery that Peter Guralnick unlocks. Written with grace, sensitivity, and passion, Careless Love is a unique contribution to our understanding of American popular culture and the nature of success, giving us true insight into one of the most misunderstood public figures of our times. Source: www.amazon.com
In his first date with Ginger Alden, Elvis got out a copy of Cheiro’s Book of Numbers, indicating she should join him and then asked her for her birth date. She was, he calculated, a number four, which suggested she would be a loyal and sensitive person. Elvis was a number eight, which made him one of the individualist, misunderstood and lonely people. A religious book came next, and the two sat side by side on the bed reading to each other until deep into the night. It was almost daylight when Elvis had one of the guys drive her home, having behaved like a perfect gentleman the entire time, Ginger told her mother, who breathlessly awaited her report. On their next date, Elvis had planned a flight to show her Memphis by night, but then suddenly decided that, along with a couple of bodyguards, they should go to Las Vegas for the night – fifteen hundred miles away. In mid-air he gave Ginger a first gift of a gold bracelet with diamonds. Many more would follow.
Ginger was a little disappointed that they weren’t going to get to see much of Las Vegas: they went straight to Elvis’ suite, and all Elvis wanted was for her to put on some oversize pajamas and come to bed. She was a little apprehensive until he gave her his solemn oath that it was out of spirituality that he was drawn to her, and that he would treat her like a lady at all times. Then he fell asleep as she read to him, and the two of them lay innocently side by side until well into the next day. Larry Geller was concerned that, for all of his talk of the rejuvenating nature of his love for Ginger, Elvis might be “killing himself, striving for her love and attention.” He was very needy and wanted her with him all the time. At the end of May bad news came in the headlines of a tabloid newspaper in Britain which published extracts from Elvis: What Happened? authored by two ex-members from the Memphis Mafia. The section chosen for serialisation was a lurid account of how, off his head on anger, Elvis had asked Sonny West to murder Priscilla’s lover, Mike Stone. According to Ricky Stanley, Elvis tried to minimize the betrayal saying he had to think about plans for his marriage to Ginger. Although he was getting calls from the press in regard to the book his former bodyguards had written, Elvis was more concerned now about his tour and marriage plans. On January 26th, he gave Ginger the ring, and then on January 28th he bought additional jewelry for her to complete her engagement ring. The engagement was confirmed by Vernon in 1978 on the Good Housekeeping interview.
But during a particular disappointing night on his Vegas tour, Elvis started talking about Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ, to evangelist Rex Humbard who came to visit backstage. Humbard recalled, “I took both his hands in mine and said, ‘Elvis, right now I want to pray for you.’ He said, ‘Please do,’ and started weeping.” After a heated argument with Ginger, Elvis complained to Billy and Dr. Nick he was having a “one-sided love affair.” What bothered his entourage was the way Ginger had Elvis running around in circles, doing everything he could to try to impress her and her family. But no one missed the fact that her presence could pick him up, as it had on New Year’s Eve in Pittsburgh, where he gave one of his best performances in a long time. When Ginger asked Elvis about his entourage, he told her the only reason most were around was because of the money. To Kathy Westmoreland Elvis spoke convincingly of his happiness, and Kathy had no doubt that his feelings toward Ginger were real. Elvis's world was now confined almost entirely to his bedroom and his books. He recruited Larry to help Ginger with her spiritual education. Ginger meanwhile was occupied with more mundane matters, like redecorating the bathroom at Graceland in turquoise and white.
“How will they remember me?” Elvis asked over and over again. “They’re not going to remember me. I’ve never done anything lasting. I’ve never done a classic film.” But then his mood would change. His mission in life, he said, was “to make people happy with music. And I’ll never stop until the day I die.” Red and Sonny’s book Elvis: What Happened?, had appeared in serialized form in England and Australia, and Elvis fans around the world were exchanging shocked telephone calls. “The first two chapters are about him giving drugs to a girl and how he put a ‘contract’ on Mike Stone,” wrote fan Donna Lewis in her diary. “What horrible lies!” Elvis was anguished, and yet he could still lapse into a state of denial that allowed him to believe the book itself might never come out. That may have been one of the reasons he refused to respond to Frank Sinatra’s camp about doing something serious to stop publication, but Larry thought part of Elvis seemed to accept exposure as the punishment he deserved. On the other hand, sometimes Elvis said that he felt like Jesus betrayed by his disciples. He just retreated to his room and his books and the medication that he needed to take his mind off the pain that never went away. Sometimes Elvis talked to Billy about having Red and Sonny West killed. “He said, ‘Goddamn them! If they hurt my career, I will have them killed.’ ”
Ginger Alden: Billy Smith has told numerous untruths and owes me a huge apology. Elvis warned me the jealousy by others was so thick, you could cut it with a knife. Most people don't look up to the majority of the Memphis Maphia (Dick Grob, Shirley Dieu, etc.) by any means. I have witnessed their character and lies. I do hope Billy reads my book to understand how much he speculated on, and even Billy said I was coming back on the last tour. Elvis brought up marriage numerous times to me, bought me a new car 4 weeks before passing, visited my mother's home ten days before passing to check on the landscaping he had just put in as part of a gift to buy the house for her and while there, he wrote a beautiful note to me, he sang and was having a great time. He also set a wedding date with me hours before passing and wanted to announce the engagement from his show in Memphis. Elvis and I loved each other and were looking forward to many things.
Some have criticised Ginger Alden for lacking emotion in some parts of her narrative. This is an unfairly harsh view, which appears to be driven by a political agenda, rather than a balanced and considered appraisal of her book. While segments of Elvis & Ginger are descriptive in nature and not surprisingly emotionally detached, there are also moments which reflect resonant emotional intensity: That particular night in Binghamton, I experienced a complex convergence of emotions brought on by my own feelings of loss, coupled with my ongoing anxiety about Elvis’s dependency on sleep medication and the effects the drugs seemed to sometimes have on his personality. I really wanted to help him. Everything suddenly hit me like a freight train and I began to cry. I just needed to, if only to relieve the emotional pressure. When he saw my tears, Elvis thought I must be upset with him. “You’re not happy with me,” he ventured. I shook my head. How could I begin to explain? “Elvis I love you,” I said. “It’s not that, I worry about your medications sometimes.” One of the reasons many people around Elvis did not like Ginger is because she was not an enabler to everything Elvis said or wanted. She would say No to him and dared to criticize his increasing dependence on prescription drugs. Ginger Alden was the last girlfriend of Elvis Presley, and at his request she was with him almost every day from November 1976 till August 1977. She went with Elvis on his last tour, and during his last vacation in Hawaii in March 1977. Ginger was the last person he saw.
The debate over Elvis’ death would rage for over twenty years. In the autopsy report, codeine had appeared at ten times the therapeutic level, methaqualone (Quaalude) in an arguably toxic amount, three other drugs appeared to be on the borderline of toxicity taken in and of themselves, and “the combined effect of the central nervous system depressants and the codeine.” Before he was laid in the grave, the legend of Elvis, which was impossible for even the Colonel to register, had been retailed, but now it was overwhelmed in a condemn of his frail humanity. The cacophony of voices that have joined together to create a chorus of uninformed speculation, symbolism and blame, can be difficult at times to drown out. In the face of facts, if we are to hear Elvis’ message, it is necessary to listen unprejudiced: the embrace of a male vulnerability culturally denied, the unabashed striving for freedom. Elvis Presley may have lost his way, but even in his darkest moments, he still retained some of the same innocent transparency that first defined him. Elvis had an awareness of his own limitations, his very faith was tested by his recognition of how far he had fallen from what he had set out to achieve—but for all of his doubt, for all of his disappointment, for all of the self-loathing that he frequently felt, and all of the disillusionment and fear, he continued to believe in a democratic ideal of redemptive transformation.
“Well I’ve tried to be the same all through this thing,” Elvis declared in 1962. “Naturally, you learn a lot about people, and you get involved in a lot of different situations, but I’ve tried to be the same. I’ve always considered other people’s feelings. I never kicked anybody on my way. I don’t just sign the autographs and the pictures and so forth to help my popularity or make them like me. I do it because I know that they’re sincere, and they see you and they want an autograph to take home. It’s simple. It’s just the way I was brought up by my mother and father to have respect for other people’s feelings.” —Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley (2000) by Peter Guralnick
Many of those Memphis Mafia guys cannot be trusted, their memories are tainted by self-interest and guilt, but Jerry Schilling is not one of those guys. He had grown up a bit damaged, never really had a home as a child, and Elvis took him in and bought him a home in Los Angeles, saying to him, “Jerry, you never had a home growing up. I want you to have one.” Traveling with the Elvis entourage was eye-opening for him. There’s a funny story about him sleeping on the couch at Elvis’ house in Hollywood, when suddenly, middle of the night, the front door opens. Jerry is freaked out. Who is it? A woman strolls across the room and goes and knocks on Elvis’ bedroom door. Jerry has no idea who she is, how did she get in, why does she have a key, so he calls out to her, “Miss?” scaring her half to death. She screams at the top of her lungs. Elvis opens his bedroom door, in tears of laughter, having heard the scream, and says, “Jerry, relax, it’s just Annie.” As in Ann-Margret. Jerry was mortified. Elvis thought it was the funniest thing and told everyone about it the next day: Jerry interrogating Ann-Margret in the middle of the night as though she was a burglar.
Jerry Schilling’s relationship with Elvis was purer than most, although many of the same rules still applied. He talks about comforting Priscilla once in the middle of an argument she was having with her husband, and Elvis’ rage when he found out, and how crushed Jerry was by all of it. He was just trying to help. Elvis said, “Don’t ever speak to Priscilla behind my back.” Jerry was in tears. Elvis came to him later that day and apologized. There’s so much dirt out there about Elvis. If by “dirt” you mean womanizing, the man was a sex symbol. Why is his womanizing somehow unique? If by “dirt” you mean being addicted to prescription drugs, well then welcome to America where that is the #1 addiction in the land. Elvis hasn’t quite gone through the character assassination that, say, Joan Crawford did on the heels of her ingrate daughter’s vicious book, but something similar has occurred, at least in the cultural consciousness. Can we still not forgive him for being human? What did Elvis Presley ever do that was just so beyond-the-pale wrong? Punching a gas station attendant once? Making the mistake of dying too young? Trust those who loved him over those who wanted something from him. Jerry Schilling: Elvis knew I was sensitive, and sometimes he’d get pissed at the other guys just because they’d been around so long – but then he’d wink at me, like, “Don’t worry about it.” After a while I realized he was almost as shy as I was; there were days when he would just brood over things, because he was so unhappy with the reality of his accomplishments. And yet he chose to be sensitive – most of the time. Read those words again. “And yet he chose to be sensitive – most of the time.” He made a choice. The majority of stories about him are about his politeness, his kindness, his generosity, and what a good listener he was. This was not an act, it was a choice. It was his desire to do his best on this planet. Very few people operate in this space, let alone stars. A lifetime of people saying “He was the kindest person I’ve ever met’, “He was the sweetest gentlest man” is not a lie foisted upon us by an entitled star pulling the wool over our eyes. Source: www.sheilaomalley.com
Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley reps sue over image use: The King and The blond bombshell’s estates have filed suit against a Big Apple company, claiming they bilked them out of more than $350,000 after breaking a contract. TapouT LLC, Monroe’s estate, and Presley’s ABG EPE IP LLC claim in a newly filed Manhattan Supreme Court suit that Central Mills Inc. failed to cough up remaining funds owed after the companies parted ways in December 2017. Both LLCs control rights to certain pending and registered trademarks for Monroe and Presley and signed an agreement with Central Mills that allotted them various percentages of royalties, provided the company met mandatory minimum sales for any clothing or wares bearing either celeb’s image. But after terminating agreements, Central Mills left the Monroe and Presley LLCs in the dust, failing to cough up a total of $353,500 in royalties and penalties. This is no Lifetime movie. Source: nypost.com
Elvis spared no expense in maintaining and running Graceland. Marty Lacker estimated that Elvis’s payroll ran to about $100,000 a month plus Graceland's maintenance expenses cost about $40,000 a month. As the year 1970 came to an end, Elvis began spending money like water. He bought jewelry for everyone in Graceland, expensive cars for his entourage and Barbara Leigh, put down a $10,000 deposit on a new home for Joe and Joanie Esposito, and developed an obsession with guns. Although Elvis’s income had swelled dramatically throughout his career, in 1969 he had come dangerously close to bankruptcy. In 1971, his net income approached $3 million, and in 1972 it swelled to nearly $4 million. The vast increase in Elvis’s income came mostly from live performances, especially from touring. Elvis did not, however, become rich. His performances grossed on average about $5 million a year during the last several years of his life, but at his death his total assets probably amounted to substantially less than $3 million. Like his parents, Elvis apparently never thought about saving any money for a rainy day. He never bought stocks, corporate bonds, or rental property for investment and income. The final inventory of his possessions filed in the court records of Shelby County show that he did buy a $10,000 US government bond. He probably forgot he had it. Unlike many other high-income Americans, Elvis never took advantage of available tax shelters. Medical doctors, for instance, in the 1960s and 1970s, reaped unprecedented profits due to a relative shortage of physicians to meet the swelling “baby boomer” population. Seeking to escape from federal income taxes that might take away a third or more of their income, doctors bought farms, which provided tax shelters legitimated by the Congress. Elvis did keep horses and sometimes rode, but he rejected the elite’s fiscal model. He spent all that he made as fast as he made it—like the great majority of the fans who came to see him in Las Vegas or Tahoe, Buffalo, Little Rock, or Wichita.
Elvis never became urbane. He eschewed New York, and he never really “went Hollywood.” In Los Angeles, he was practically never in the nightclubs, never at the Oscars, never in the homes of the famous for dinners or social events. Rather, he walled himself up in one of his mansions with the guys. Anyone who wanted to socialize with Elvis had to come to his house. Like other Americans, he partied in Las Vegas and retreated to Palm Springs, but home was home. The first great Elvis image—the “Bad Elvis”—was launched by the young women at the Shell in Overton Park in July 1954. The second Elvis image—the “Good Elvis”—was the creature of the Cold War, clearly visible on the flight deck of the USS Hancock in San Diego Bay in April 1956. The third and final Elvis image, much more complex than the first two, brought back the bad Elvis in another mutation. Now Elvis was “bad” in the sense that bad meant “good,” even “the best.” Liberate yourself and have fun, he urged white Americans tired of black civil rights activists, Communist confrontations, and a demoralizing war in Vietnam. He was self-confident, neither giving nor accepting abuse, joyous, loving life, hedonistic but harmless. His new image was hatched with the Comeback Special and achieved full flight during his first engagement at the International Hotel in Las Vegas in August 1969. On November 5 and 6, 1971, Joyce Bova joined Elvis as he performed in Cleveland and Louisville. She observed that there were no “high rollers” in the audience such as she had seen in his audiences in Las Vegas. These huge crowds were true believers.
Increasingly, Elvis was seeing himself as the messiah to the masses. His mission in life, he kept telling Joyce, was to make people’s dreams come true. She saw guns and books scattered about in his hotel room, and he always carried his badge from the Bureau of Narcotics. After the November tour, Elvis flew to Memphis, then to California, and then back to Memphis where on Saturday night, December 11, 1971, he took Joyce Bova to a private screening at the Crosstown Theater. Increasingly, Elvis talked to Joyce about moving into Graceland with him, but she worried about his rapid mood swings—and the pills they both were taking. Plus, he was still married to Priscilla. On Sunday, he and Joyce flew to Washington and checked into the hotel where they had first consummated their love. On Tuesday, he flew back to Memphis and on Saturday Priscilla and Lisa Marie arrived from California. Now it was Priscilla who had some news for Elvis. Priscilla told Elvis that she did not love him anymore and was separating from him. She and Lisa stayed for Christmas but flew out the night before New Year’s Eve. Joyce tried again to talk to him about his drug use. The drugs were a part of his mission, he said. The drugs were to gain “silence.” “Silence is the resting place of the soul,” he said. “It’s sacred. And necessary for new thoughts to be born. That’s what my pills are for, to get as close as possible to that silence,” he explained. Joyce left the next morning while Elvis was still sleeping.
Rita Moreno was another conquest in the early 1960s who had been baffled by her intimate experiences with the King. “Elvis asked me out several times,” she recalled in Rita Moreno: A Memoir (2012). “His real self was a shy boy from Tupelo whose favorite book was the Bible. Our sex activity felt short of my expectations and needs, typically ending up in my Sunset Boulevard apartment. My dates with Elvis always concluded in a tender tussle on the living room floor. This was called 'grinding' and it was all he really wanted to do, with no culmination. At least, the red glare of the traffic lights lent a carnal glow to our activities. I was a fully grown woman with adult desires and I already had been with Marlon Brando.”
The number of girls streaming in and out of Elvis’s bed diminished while Linda Thompson stayed with him, but not to zero. Linda had wanted a career in show business and a measure of financial support. Elvis helped her move toward a career, and he was very generous to her in a material way, buying her a house and giving her a 30.000 $ credit card as farewell gift. His divorce settlement with Priscilla had amounted to two million dollars. Elvis was a considerate man as well as a generous one. But years on a psychiatrist’s couch might not have sufficed to untangle the painful emotional threads that made up Elvis’s being at that point in his life, September 1974. One vital thread was his fear that he was not really the highly sexual man that he thought he ought to be. According to Sheila Ryan, “Elvis was just this guy who had this wonderful charisma and things got blown way out of shape. But he was always just this innocent little guy. Elvis had qualities that no other human being has had. Some of them are so hard to describe because the qualities he had were almost not of this world, angelic. It was his innocence, his vulnerability.” Sheila was increasingly unwilling to go on tour with Elvis. “There wasn’t much at stake. I was his friend, I was his little pal.” She was relieved when he took Mindi Miller, a model and dancer, with him for the first part of his tour that began in Macon, Georgia, on April 4, 1975. Elvis wanted Sheila to go with him for his third tour in 1975, seventeen days that began on July 8, but by then she was practically living with actor James Caan, so she couldn't join Elvis on tour. Elvis seemed to accept the end of their relationship.
Ginger Alden was not easily readable. In her dark good looks, at five-eight and with appropriate fullness of figure, she was not a teenager. She was twenty. From the first, it seems, Elvis chose her—not as simply another girl in his usual game of revolving doors but as a permanent bedmate and companion. Ginger had, as Billy Smith said, “that virginal look” that was so important to Elvis. In the order of Elvis’s women, she ranked with Anita Wood, Priscilla Beaulieu, Joyce Bova, and Linda Thompson. Back in Tennessee, Ginger was supposed to go with Elvis to Nashville on Thursday, January 20, 1977, for a scheduled recording session for RCA. At the last minute, Ginger backed out. Elvis postponed his departure for a day, and he had a prolonged and acrimonious argument with her. The next day he went to Nashville without her but would not go to the studio. He spent much of his time in the hotel room calling Ginger. For three days the backup singers, the band, and the technicians waited in the studio for Elvis to appear. Finally, Elvis flew back to Memphis without recording anything at all. Elvis’s intense involvement with Ginger and her family strongly suggested that he was into the traditional progression of love and courtship that would end in marriage. But Ginger seemed detached at times. She was not as pliable as one might think on first impression. She had a mind and a will of her own, and she acted accordingly. And Elvis was not used to rejection. He tried to make Ginger jealous with other girls, but he had neither the energy nor the interest. So he asked Ginger to marry him. He thought Christmas or his birthday might be the right date—maybe he would even announce it at the Memphis concert ending the tour. Ginger agreed to become Mrs. Elvis Presley. Elvis envisioned his second marriage would be his own creation. He did not need the Colonel.
Regardless of what he said publicly, Elvis had long been bitter about the restraints that he felt Colonel Parker had placed upon his artistic creativity. Since the late 1960s, Elvis had wanted to fire the Colonel, but Parker had bound him hand and foot financially. Elvis made millions, but he had no millions to buy Tom Parker out. If he fired the Colonel he would essentially be broke. In effect, the Colonel had been loaning Elvis one-sixth of the profits they made from each tour since they signed that agreement in January 1976. Now Elvis agreed to pay back all those moneys at the end of 1977 and he was in surviving mode. When Elvis set out on his first tour of 1977 on February 12, he insisted that Ginger come with him. He made the most of Ginger’s presence on the tour. It was the usual routine that he relished so much. She would be publicly introduced as his girlfriend, the very image of love fulfilled. The fans loved this charming play. They melted into the romance; they were a part of it. The King had found his Princess. Elvis fans had come to yearn for Elvis’s remarriage. Ginger later said that “they always would come up to me and say, ‘You’re what he’s searched for a long time.’ ” Eight days into the February tour, to keep Ginger happy, Elvis flew some of her family to Johnson City, Tennessee, and carried them on to Charlotte, North Carolina.
Elvis has a co-writing credit on, and actually participated in the composition of two songs from the early 60s - "That's Someone You'll Never Forget" (1961) and "You'll Be Gone" (1965). Sweetheart we're alone. And you are mine. Let's make this night a night to remember. Don't make our love a cold dying ember. For with the dawn, you'll be gone. Hold me close in your arms as the night withers away. Oh please come to my arms and say you'll love me forever. Your lips pressed on mine is heaven descending. And I could die because it is ending. For with the dawn, you'll be gone.
The groundbreaking new album, Elvis Presley—Where No One Stands Alone (2018), releasing on August 10, features 14 original performances of gospel songs with newly recorded instrumentation and backing vocals, all in support of Elvis’ original lead vocal recordings. “Saved” is an energetic gospel-rock call-and-response tune with some fun rhythmic twists, sassy lyrics and Darlene Love jumping in on background vocals. And in classic Elvis fashion, the king testifies as he gives up his errant ways. Produced by Joel Weinshanker, Lisa Marie Presley and Andy Childs, Elvis Presley—Where No One Stands Alone introduces newly recorded instrumentation and backing vocal contributions from music legends who’d performed on-stage and/or in-the-studio with Elvis, including Darlene Love, Cissy Houston, The Imperials and The Stamps. It also includes a reimagined duet with Elvis and his daughter, Lisa Marie Presley, on the album’s title track and spiritual touchstone. “It was a very powerful and moving experience to sing with my father,” wrote Lisa Marie in her notes for the album. “The lyrics speak to me and touch my soul. I’m certain that the lyrics spoke to my father in much the same way.” Plus, the 50th anniversary celebration of the Elvis ’68 Comeback Special is coming to theaters in August, 16 and 20. Source: parade.com
Although Ann refused, out of respect for Elvis, to discuss their love affair publicly, she referred to him in her 1994 memoir as her “soul mate.” She knew Elvis had promises to keep, and he vowed to keep his word. Ann-Margret was obviously referring to the Beaulieus’ arrangement with Elvis for Priscilla. “I really believe Elvis told Priscilla’s parents that he was going to marry her… and that was the deal,” Joe said. Ann-Margret made Elvis get outside his comfort zone; in many ways he liked that, but was also afraid of that. Elvis was threatened, in the judgment of virtually everyone who knew him, by Ann-Margret’s fame and independence. Patti explained: “I was in awe of Priscilla, but Ann-Margret—she and Elvis were equals. She was the best girl, the most fun. They would have been the perfect pair. But she wouldn’t give up her career, she wouldn’t be with him twenty-four hours a day, and he wanted someone who would be there twenty-four hours a day.” Other Elvis’s intimates shared this opinion. “Elvis knew Ann had a career and wasn’t going to give it up for him. He wouldn’t expect her to. And he knew he could never be with someone who was in the limelight; when he wanted them there, he wanted them. Not like ‘I’m on location, I can’t do it.’ Priscilla he knew would be there whenever he wanted her,” Joe reported. Priscilla enrolled in a dance class in Whitehaven, the Memphis suburb where Graceland was located, then tinted her long hair Titian and pulled it back from her face in a mod-style bouffant, like Ann-Margret in Viva Las Vegas.
“The one person Priscilla wanted to look like, when she did her hair, was Ann-Margret,” confirmed Dee Stanley, who was fashion-conscious herself and noticed the transformation. “Everything like Ann-Margret she wanted to become.” “That’s because Ann-Margret was the love of his life, and Priscilla knew it,” commented Patti. Elvis’s feelings for the actress remained constant throughout his life; from 1964, when they broke off their relationship, until August 16, 1977, the date of his death, he sent her roses before every one of her performances. Elvis reconnected with Ann-Margret after one of her performances in Vegas that year. He called her late that night while she was with her husband, Roger Smith, hinting that he wanted her to come to his room to rekindle their relationship, but Ann declined.
Priscilla had become more confident of her standing in Elvis’s life, even instituting changes at Graceland. She never had to balance a checkbook and had an unlimited clothes budget. To a different young woman, a life of leisure with Elvis Presley might have been a fabulous fantasy, but for Priscilla, who craved variety and action and full-throttle sex, it was a form of exile. Heavy make-out sessions continued to be Elvis’s sex of choice with Priscilla; he seemed to get more pleasure, other sexual partners would attest, from dry-humping than from intercourse, due at least in part to his performance anxiety. “Yeah, he had hang-ups,” confirmed Sheila Ryan Caan, one of Elvis’s girlfriends. “He never completely grew up.” This was in some measure, Sheila believed, a residual fear of getting a woman pregnant and being sued for paternity. “Plus, he was a southern small-town guy. I mean, he kind of never grew up and dry-humping was kind of a thing. Actually, I kind of liked it. He liked the playing part. He was not perverse at all.” Elvis’s reluctance to complete intercourse with Priscilla left her frustrated often. Elvis was a victim of his sexually omnipotent image. As Priscilla analyzed: “I heard that the same phenomenon happened with Marilyn Monroe. She was a sex symbol, a sex goddess, and anyone who was with her expected to be blown out the door with ecstasy. And because of that, she was very insecure in that area. So it’s something that I can honestly see how he felt like that, because women talk about it, you know?” In a certain way, it begged the question whether Elvis and Priscilla had intercourse in Germany as Currie Grant claimed. Elvis felt that if he withdrew before the "sensation hit", it kept the woman as a virgin, in his mind anyway, so maybe he did think she was a virgin when they married, even though it was just an illusion. Being in Memphis while Elvis was shooting in L.A. or recording in Nashville was tantamount to solitary confinement to Priscilla. “Because I didn’t have anything to do!” she complained. “He didn’t want me to work. I remember shopping every single day!” Rumors began circulating through Elvis’s entourage that Priscilla was having an affair with her dance instructor Steve Peck.
The prim, “good-girl” side of Priscilla’s split personality had deceived even Joe Esposito, who had known her since she was fourteen, for Priscilla admitted in her memoir that she had a sexual liaison with someone from her dance class, identified pseudonymously as “Mark.” “We knew about it,” said Charlie Hodge, who believed Priscilla’s lover was Steve Peck. “In fact, we were talking about it in a group with Elvis, and one of the guys said, ‘We could get a detective to follow her.’” But Elvis forbade them to use a private investigator to tail Priscilla and would not allow anyone to say a disparaging or unkind word about her in his presence. “Elvis said, ‘Anybody does that, they’re fired.’” The affair was reminiscent of the teenage Priscilla, back in Germany, when she maintained a double life with another boyfriend while Elvis was thousands of miles away in the United States, believing her to be faithful. Priscilla’s barely buried resentment came out years later, after Elvis died and she assumed control of the estate, when she would refer to certain members of the entourage as “has-beens and leeches”.
In 1968, Elvis followed the TV comeback special with two critically and commercially successful singles, “In the Ghetto” and “Suspicious Minds,” and the comeback briefly revived his dormant sexual relationship with Priscilla, though it was still a “different kind of relationship,” in her words, meaning there was little intercourse. She and Elvis, Priscilla said, usually had sex on the nights he opened and closed in Vegas each January and August, a ritual that resembled the mating habits of some exotic species, since they were seldom intimate on other occasions. After one of Elvis’s 1970 openings in Vegas, Priscilla missed her period for two months and thought she was pregnant. She told Elvis, and he was “elated. He was calling me every single day to see if in fact I was. And then when I told him that I wasn’t, it was a disappointment.” She was not happy in her lifestyle with Elvis; this was plain to all who knew Priscilla and from everything she said after their divorce. One of her primary complaints was that she and Elvis did not spend enough time together, but by show business standards, theirs was a relatively standard marriage in terms of family time as a couple: From 1967 to 1970 they took regular holidays in Hawaii, vacationed in the Bahamas, and spent Christmas at Graceland. Becky Yancey, the Graceland secretary, remembered Elvis buying Priscilla expensive jewelry—diamond rings, watches, charm bracelets.
This would have been some women’s Cinderella story, but the glass slipper did not fit Priscilla. She was restless, sexually unfulfilled, dissatisfied, and bored—as she had been, in truth, from her first days at Graceland. The difference now was that she had realized her goal—to marry Elvis Presley—and she could move on. Nancy Rooks, the longtime Graceland maid, always felt, interestingly, that Priscilla “was not as much in love with Elvis as he was with her.” Elvis once told Kathy Westmoreland, his friend and backup singer after 1970, that Priscilla “never loved him, she only wanted a career for herself.” Elvis was still searching for answers to the spiritual questions that both haunted and compelled him, issues that did not intrigue Priscilla or most of his male entourage, whose interests were more shallow. Elvis told actress Barbara Leigh that the spiritual dimension was missing from his relationship with Priscilla. A declaration signed by Elvis in his divorce papers attested he knew about Mike Stone by December and that Priscilla informed him, that Christmas holiday, that she wanted her freedom; Becky Yancey confirmed this in a book she wrote in 1977. Elvis spent his birthday, January 8, at Graceland with Joyce Bova, while Priscilla rejoined Mike Stone at their apartment in Belmont Shore. Ed Parker later wrote of a conversation he had with Elvis around this time, when Elvis told him Priscilla was leaving him: “He poured out his soul that night, and I saw him cry for the first time.”
Elvis, once past his initial anger over Priscilla’s betrayal, slipped into a frightening decline. The maids at Graceland noticed that he lay around much of the time, exhibiting “a lot of depressed feelings and loneliness,” as Nancy Rooks stated it. “There was a lot of talk about his mother. On Mother’s Day he would cry. He wanted her picture by his bed.” The catalyst was Priscilla’s departure: “He thought they should always be together.” Elvis and Red West wrote, and Elvis recorded, the song “Separate Ways” that year, a transparently autobiographical account of his breakup with Priscilla. Barbara Leigh had little sympathy for the story Priscilla would later tell of her hellish life with Elvis: “I think she tries to paint herself as the good one in the picture, when I know, in truth, that she broke his heart forever.” Ed Hookstratten, who handled the divorce, held Priscilla responsible as well. “After that, Elvis started to slide,” he said. “And after that, he slid and slid, until he finally died. The divorce was the turning point, and I was close to that situation. I saw it with my own eyes.” It was Elvis who filed for divorce from Priscilla on August 18, 1972, six months after their final encounter in Las Vegas, though the instigator was clearly Priscilla. “He did not want the divorce,” asserted Ed Hookstratten, who filed the petition for Elvis. After Elvis' death, Priscilla became the executrix of Elvis’s estate.
Elvis' physical decline had worsened when his relationships with Sheila Ryan and Linda Thompson ended late in 1976. His entourage would say Elvis dismissed Linda, who was having an affair with a musician named David Briggs; Linda’s account was that she moved out voluntarily, tired of Elvis’s “vampire” life. Quite probably it was a combination. “I think that Linda was growing tired of it all,” said Shirley Dieu, who was living with Joe Esposito then. “If you were with Elvis, you had to stay in a locked room with foil on the windows. I think she got fed up, and she heard that David was worth a million dollars and she latched right on to him. Everybody felt that Elvis knew it but didn’t want to be embarrassed by it, and he made it look like he was getting rid of her before she left.” On November 19, 1976, George Klein ferried the Alden sisters, Terry and Ginger, to Graceland to meet Elvis.
Elvis had an immediate, almost out-of-body experience upon seeing Ginger Alden. “His first words to me were, ‘Ginger, you’re burning a hole through me,” she recalled. “When I like someone, I really like them a lot,” Elvis mumbled on their first date. “It’s not just a fling. I don’t like one-night stands.” “I don’t like one-night stands, either,” Ginger replied. Elvis told Ginger she resembled his mother, and in truth she did, particularly around the eyes, which, like those of Elvis’s mother, were brown, deep-set, expressive, and soulful. “When I see Ginger, I feel like I’m falling into my mother’s eyes,” Elvis told Larry Geller. Elvis became instantly obsessed with Ginger and telephoned her parents the next weekend to invite her to join him on his tour. By December, less than three weeks later, while Elvis was appearing in Vegas, he was picturing them married. “Elvis told me when he closed his eyes he kept having visions of me in a white gown.” He called Jo Alden, Ginger’s mother, during the Vegas engagement and said, “Mrs. Alden, I’m in love with your daughter and I want to marry her,” according to Ginger. On January 26, back at Graceland, he proposed to an incredulous Ginger. The setting, as it had been with Priscilla, was a bathroom. “I noticed a lot of commotion at Graceland,” Ginger recalled. “People coming in and out and phone calls being made often. He called me into his bathroom, where I sat in a chair as he knelt down in front of me. He said: ‘Ginger, I’ve been searching for love so long, and never in my wildest dreams did I ever think I would find it. I’ve been sixty percent happy and forty percent happy, but never a hundred percent. I’ve loved before but I've never been in love. Ginger, I’m asking you: Will you marry me?’ and then presented a gorgeous diamond ring. I was so surprised as I said yes.”
Elvis showered the bewildered Ginger with gifts. “He gave her three or four diamond rings at a time,” said Jo Alden. “She told him one time, ‘Elvis, I would be just as happy for a box of candy or flowers.’ ” Elvis responded, “Well, you’re going to have to get used to it.” Ginger recalled that “Elvis said he would love to have a son and he wanted me to be the mother. We had started a list of names.” For some of his entourage, the entire courtship had an air of almost tragic desperation. George Klein felt Ginger was “misunderstood” by the guys, because, in Jo Alden’s words, she “didn’t pal around” with them, as had Linda, who had been their favorite. Rick Stanley attributed this resentment to Elvis envy. Ricky was present when Elvis called together the guys at Graceland on January 26 to announce that Ginger had accepted his marriage proposal. “He cared about Ginger, he really did,” Ricky recalled. “He told me he was gonna marry her. Showed me the ring, the whole thing.” Kathy Westmoreland, who was still keeping company with Elvis, believed that Elvis had changed, that he was maturing, that he genuinely wanted to be in a monogamous relationship with Ginger. “He was really in love with her. I felt that she was beautiful and sweet, maybe too young to really understand him and cope with his needs at that particular point. And there were a lot of problems in his life too.” Elvis, whose dreams had been broken, saw Ginger as his potential salvation, a means of resurrecting the shattered fantasy of finding his twin soul. Marrying Ginger, to Elvis, was the magic pill—like waving a wand and erasing the regrets of his past.
Elvis and Larry had many deep conversations, occasionally drifting to the subject of Priscilla. Elvis had changed his mind in thinking they were soul mates. He still believed there was a “karmic link” between them, but it had taken on a different meaning in Elvis’s mind. “It took me a long time to realize Priscilla is not my soul mate,” he told Larry during his last few months. “Priscilla came into my life for two major reasons: one, so we could have Lisa and number two, so I could teach her. Priscilla came to learn a lot of lessons about life.” Larry recalled Elvis saying, “I had to push her out of the nest so she could fly with her own wings.” Elvis himself realized, at the end, the paternal—as opposed to carnal or erotic—connection he had with Priscilla. —"The Untold Story of Priscilla Beaulieu Presley" (1997) by Suzanne Finstad
I followed Elvis out of one of the hotel’s back doors. There, gleaming beneath nearby lights, was a brand-new white Lincoln Continental Mark V with white leather seats and a burgundy dashboard. Elvis walked toward the car and everyone gathered around it. I was still confused about why this car was here or what we were doing. Then Elvis looked at me and nonchalantly said, “It’s yours, Ginger.” To say I was overwhelmed doesn’t even begin to describe the enormity of my emotional reaction. I had never even owned a car before, and now I had a Lincoln Mark V? All I could say was, “Thank you.” I was excited to test-drive my new car, but Elvis turned to go back inside. I didn’t know Las Vegas, understood he must be tired, and was okay with following him back up to the penthouse. I was still reeling with excitement. Once we were back in the suite and seated in bed, Elvis asked me, “Have you ever been married before?” “No,” I said, a little surprised by his question. “Were you seeing anyone before we met?” he pressed. I answered, “Yes,” momentarily thinking about Linda’s phone call. I wondered if that was what had prompted this conversation. Elvis thought about this for a few moments, then said, “Well, I would like it if you wouldn’t see anyone else.” He was seriously asking for a commitment! As odd as this sounds, it also made me feel good to think that Elvis was really that serious about us. But how could I be sure?
Greil Marcus is one of the talking heads in Eugene Jarecki's documentary “The King” (2017), and he makes a deep and stunning point about Elvis and “the pursuit of happiness.” For the whole notion of pursuing happiness had been written into the American Declaration of Independence. For a long time the world was too harsh a place to make that pursuit anything but a luxury. The American experiment was to democratize happiness—or, at least, the pursuit of it. And Elvis Presley acted that out with every sexy-cherubic smile and jolt of his body and crystal-clear tremolo he sang. “The King” (released on Amazon DVD on August 17, 2018) lets you hear that. And then it asks: How, in a culture devoted to the pursuit of happiness, with an artist like Elvis as its king, did we begin to lose sight of how to achieve our own happiness? And how can we get that back? “The King” ends with a brilliant montage set to an astonishing piece of footage: Elvis, right at the end, when he’s a pale, drugged-out mess, seated on stage at the piano singing “Unchained Melody”. It’s wrecked, and it’s transcendent. We hear what Elvis was, what he became, and what he could have been. To watch “The King” is to feel, about America, that same fusion of memory and loss, devastation and hope. Source: variety.com
In the National Archive documents pertaining to the President Richard Nixon and Elvis Presley meeting in December 1970, there is a memorandum from Egil Krogh, explaining that “Presley indicated that he thought the Beatles had been a real force for anti-American spirit…The president nodded in agreement… Violence, drug usage, dissent, protest, all seem to merge in generally the same group of young people… Presley also mentioned that he is studying Communist brainwashing and the drug culture for over ten years.” The irony, of course, is that while Presley was seeking to procure an undercover narcotics agent’s badge, he was addicted to a combination of prescription drugs that would lead to his untimely death in 1977 at the age of 42. Most of Nixon’s years in office (1969-74) were consumed by crisis. The United States would suffer a major defeat in Vietnam during his administration. Nixon faced enormous unrest and the Watergate scandal ultimately drove him out of the executive office in disgrace.
"Vietnam sucked you into the jungle, it sucked you in, and from there—whether you believed that we were good turned evil, or evil to begin with—you returned evil, all morality vanished. What happened there, he wondered: did you become evil, or did you just see your true evil self? Who was transforming whom? whichever—and you could never know—there you were stuck, there you remained. Vietnam was a mirror, and America—with each occasional glimpse at its true exposed self—took a step back, a step away from the mirror, from the truth; toward retreat and deceit, because self-delusion was easy… Vietnam was a swamp from which you never emerged. The best hope, the only way out, was to disengage. But what if you couldn’t disengage? What if we had become Vietnam?" Elvis stared at the box. Then he looked at Richard Nixon, into his eyes. The President seemed even more ill at ease than before, smiling nervously, and now Elvis saw—the thought flashed in his head—that it was all an act. That you construct a kingdom, lives around you, and then they turn you out. Elvis hovers just this side of caricature, but redeemed by his core sweetness. —"Elvis and Nixon" (2001) by Jonathan E. Lowy
The evolution of popular music: USA 1960–2010: Between 1960 and 2009, the mean frequency of H1 declined by about 75%. H1 captures the use of dominant-seventh chords. Inherently dissonant (because of the tritone interval between the third and the minor-seventh), these chords are commonly used in Jazz to create tensions that are eventually resolved to consonant chords featured in tracks such as “I Feel So Bad” by Elvis Presley; songs tagged blues or jazz have a high frequency of H1; it is especially common in the songs of Blues artists such as B.B. King and Jazz artists such as Nat ‘King’ Cole.
The decline of this topic, then, represents the lingering death of Jazz and Blues in the Hot 100 Billboard. Styles and genres represent populations of music that have evolved unique characters (topics), or combinations of characters, in partial geographical or cultural isolation, like country music in the Southern USA during the 1920s. Between 1967 and 1977, the mean frequency of H3 more than doubles. H6 combines several chord changes that are a mainstay in modal rock tunes. Its increase between 1978 and 1985, and subsequent decline in the early 1990s, marks the age of Arena Rock. Of all H-topics, H5 shows the most striking change in frequency. This topic, which captures the absence of identifiable chord structure, barely features in the 1960s and 1970s when, a few spoken-word-music collages aside (e.g. those of Dickie Goodman), nearly all songs had clearly identifiable chords. H5 starts to become more frequent in the late 1980s and then rises rapidly to a peak in 1993. Source: rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org
"Treat me like a fool, Treat me mean and cruel, But love me. Wring my faithful heart, Tear it all apart, But love me. If you ever go, Darling, I'll be oh so lonely, I'll be sad and blue, Crying over you, dear only. I would beg and steal, Just to feel your heart, Beatin' close to mine. Well, if you ever go, Darling, I'll be oh so lonely, I'll be sad and blue, Crying over you, dear only. Beggin' on knees, All I ask is please, please love me." ―"Love Me" by Elvis Presley, written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, recorded August 1, 1956
The beautiful Ms Linda Thompson shared so much of the Presley lifestyle after the departure of Priscilla that the word ‘relationship’ barely covers what they meant to each other. Linda met him on July 6, 1972. "I was Miss Tennessee Universe and T. G. Sheppard invited me to the Memphian Theater after midnight. I had a lot of trepidation about it. But my girlfriend, who was Miss Rhode Island, said we had to go. So if we hadn’t have gone, I probably would never have met Elvis. I even made a joke about the Dracula look and Elvis wasn’t fazed. He sat down and was very sweet. It was as if we had known each other our whole lives." But the doubts resurfaced that night. "I got home at about four o’clock in the morning and the phone rang. It was Elvis. His speech was slurred. I had never been around anyone who was incapacitated like that. I said, ‘Are you drunk? Why is your voice slurred?’ He said, ‘Oh, honey, I’m just tired.’ Of course, I found out he took sleeping medication, and I am sure he had taken a sleeping pill before talking to me. I wasn’t nervous because he was so down home and down to earth – there really was a sense of humility about him."
"I never felt more loved and more listened to and more known than when I was with him. One of the most beautiful qualities a person can have is humility and Elvis personified that. I always felt that he took the time to listen, to engage in conversation, to look you in the eye, to get tears in his eyes when the subject got to something sentimental. For Elvis it was love at first sight. He invited me to meet his father Vernon. Right away, he was saying, “Where have you been all my life?” It was part of his personality to want to hear things straight. Then we went straight to Las Vegas, where he was rehearsing for his shows at the Hilton. There were times when he was very paternal with me, very nurturing and caring. And there were times when I was very maternal to him because he was such a big baby." The affection bred pet names for each other: "I called him “Gullion” and “Bunton” and he called me “Adriadne” and “Mommy”. She didn’t accept that he wasn’t always the most faithful of lovers: "I tried to understand it. I was very young and he was very needy. There were times when Elvis wanted me to be with him all the time. In the first year, he did not even go to a dentist without my accompanying him. I was with him twenty-four hours a day in that first year. Apparently, he broke his record for fidelity. I knew he was mostly faithful because he never left my side and I never left his. I adored him and so was happy to be there most of the time. I tried to understand the infidelity. He was a prisoner, sequestered with the Memphis Mafia. He always said he only loved me. I certainly felt very loved by him. He would say that in his own way, ‘I am completely faithful to you and I don’t love anyone else.’ I always felt very loved and very treasured and respected by him. When I look back, the thing I most remember about Elvis is his tenderness, his kindness. When he told me he loved me, he had tears in his eyes. He had great passion. He was so sensitive. And very funny. He had a bracelet that said ‘Elvis’ in diamonds and he flipped it over and it said ‘Crazy’."
Linda also believed that he couldn’t refuse women, that as a southern gentleman, he literally didn’t want to be discourteous to their advances. “He wanted to please, and he didn’t know how to be standoffish with women, because that was not how he was raised. He always treated all women like ladies.” She had no doubt about her status with him. Above all, Linda remembered ‘his tenderness, his kindness. He was sensitive, passionate. Also very funny.’ There was another side to him, she always recognised, which to many people would seem in direct contradiction to his womanising and unruly behaviour. ‘He had a very distinct spiritual side,’ she emphasised. ‘He really felt the need for a God’– and, of course, there were always the songs he chose. ‘He grew up in a spiritual environment in Tupelo,’ she recalled. Elvis's relationship with Linda derived naturally into a cordial friendship, when in November 1976, Elvis met Ginger Alden, a young model from Memphis.
Elvis invited Priscilla’s family, including her parents Paul and Ann Beaulieu, to his dressing room. He spoke to Michelle, Priscilla’s sister, about his hands. He was self-conscious that they were very bloated. But Priscilla had noticed them three years earlier on the day they met in the judge’s chambers and signed the final divorce decree. As they sat with their fingers entwined, Priscilla grew alarmed at how puffy Elvis was. “I knew something was different; something was wrong. I could see it in his eyes, I could feel it in his hands.” Now in Vegas, Paul sensed that “he didn’t want to let us go. He kept thinking of topics that would prolong the conversation, asking us what we needed and wanted.” After the divorce, Elvis had called Ann and said, “Please speak with Cilla,” and begged her to try to convince his ex-wife to come back to him. “It was a very sad conversation. I felt how desperately he wanted to keep his family together.” Ann knew that her daughter was determined to move on with her life, but she told Elvis that she would do what she could. “Please do,” he pleaded. “I want you all to be part of my family.” It was like a sword through her. “Elvis,” she said, “we’ll always be part of your family.” Priscilla knew Elvis held out hope that they would reunite. “I’d take Lisa over to his house and he’d say, ‘Cilla, go do what you have to do now. Go see the world. But when you’re forty and I’m fifty, we’ll be back together. You’ll see.” She would later say that in the last year of his life, “We underestimated his emotional pain. And he lacked the means to fully express that pain.”
Ginger Alden was learning that being on the road and staying cooped up in Las Vegas was not the heady trip that it appeared. Once the glamour wore off, Ginger was homesick for her mother and sisters. And, Elvis learned, she missed a young man she had been seeing in Memphis. One day, in their bedroom in the Imperial Suite Elvis was seemed frustrated and adrift. She rarely saw him like that, and asked what was the matter. “Elvis found out that Ginger had a boyfriend, so he told her to call him and tell him that it was over, and she wouldn’t do it. She kept saying no.” Elvis and Ginger exchanged heated words, and then in anger, Elvis picked up a glass of orange juice and threw it across the room. Shirley had just taken the plastic off her dry cleaning, and now it was covered with sticky pulp. Ginger shrugged it off: “Oh, I was so mad! But he felt bad about it, I could tell. It was sad. Linda had taken off with David Briggs, and he wanted to show her that he could get someone who was prettier and younger.” Elvis seemed all too desperate to make the romance bloom, while others accused him of keeping Ginger a virtual hostage. More and more, there seemed to be nothing Elvis wouldn’t do to win Ginger’s affections. He went to her grandfather’s funeral in Arkansas on January 3, 1977, flying her family to Harrison, Arkansas, and then accompanying Ginger on the twenty-mile drive to Jasper for services in a tiny rural church.
In Vegas, 'Memphis Mafia Princess' Shirley Dieu had caught Elvis taking Ginger’s hand and putting it between his shoulder and neck. Then he placed his own hand on top of hers, and patted it. “See Shirley,” he said, “she loves me just like you love Joe.” It worried Shirley and other friends as to how far Elvis might go. Nothing about his involvement with Ginger indicated rational thinking. In Palm Springs, especially, Elvis seemed to have almost no control over his impulses. Ginger was a symbol for Elvis, whom he could project his dreams onto, whilst in denial about what was going on in his life: his health problems, his waning youth, his conflicts with Colonel Parker. On January 26, 1977, Elvis came to Ginger and proposed with an engagement ring. “It was like old-fashioned times, he was on his knees,” recalled Ginger: “He asked me to marry him, and I said, ‘Yes.’” She was sitting in his black reading chair in the upstairs bathroom at Graceland, and he pulled out a green velvet box and produced a stunning eleven-and-a-half-carat diamond worth $70,000. He was in such a hurry for it, that jeweler Lowell Hays took the stone from Elvis’s own TCB flash ring until he could find a replacement. Ginger was now the second woman to whom Elvis had proposed in a bathroom.
Ginger often questioned Elvis’s medication use, she would say later, and tried to get him to not take the packets that Dr. George Nichopoulos (aka Dr. Nick) prescribed and Tish Henley doled out like clockwork. It was, in fact, the reason for some of their arguments. “Although I asked him to try not to use the medication that I thought he did not need, and there were times that he didn’t, I truly believed that in time I would be able to convince him.” However, on the morning of August 16, 1977, Ginger had no opportunity to reason with him because she was heavily medicated herself. She had menstrual cramps, and about 6:30, Elvis had called Tish Henley and asked her to bring up something so Ginger could sleep. The beauty queen would later say she took Quaalude tablets, but the nurse, who kept her drugs under lock and key in her trailer, would insist she sent up one Dilaudid pill, though the opiate was far more powerful than anything Ginger could have needed for menstrual pain.
Ginger didn’t watch Elvis like Linda did. Finally, at 2:20 P.M., Ginger turned over in Elvis’s huge bed and found it empty. Had he never come back to sleep? She noticed his reading light was still on, and thought it peculiar. Ginger knocked on the bathroom door. “Elvis?” There was no answer, and so she turned the knob. “That’s when I saw him in there,” she said later. Elvis was slumped on the floor, angled slightly to the right. He was on his knees, his hands beneath his face, in a near praying position. His pajama bottoms bunched at his feet. Elvis had seemed to fall off the toilet. He laid so still, so unnaturally still. Elvis’s death had not been quick. Nor had it been painless. But if Elvis had called out, Ginger likely would not have heard him, so deep was her drugged sleep. Ginger was in a state of shock. “I didn’t want to think he was dead. God wouldn’t want to take him so soon.” Elvis Presley had died of polypharmacy complications in the bathroom at Graceland, at the age of forty-two. Elvis had crawled several feet and vomited before dying—but he didn’t want Ginger to see any more, and sent her into the other room. Then he called for an ambulance, and got Dr. Nick on the phone and mumbled something about a heart attack. Ginger was struck with “an overwhelming sense of sadness, disbelief, and feeling as if Graceland had also died.” —"Baby, Let’s Play House: Elvis Presley and the women who loved him" (2009) by Alanna Nash
A new classification of sex addiction as a mental disorder by the World Health Organization could monumentally shift the conversation surrounding a condition that's often deeply misunderstood. Experts who treat sex addictions hope the classification will help change the disorder's perception from a moral failing to simply a medical issue. In its new International Classification of Diseases, WHO defines "compulsive sexual health disorder" as a "persistent pattern of failure to control intense, repetitive sexual impulses or urges resulting in repetitive sexual behavior." The new classification means that sex addiction can be diagnosed based on a list of criteria. Experts also hope the new classification will chip away at a larger goal: destigmatizing sex addiction. Most sex addicts, Magness said, are ordinary people. "Most of the people that I work with are people with very high morals, very responsible, leaders in their industries, physicians...," Dr. Milton Magness said. For those people – the vast majority of whom are men – experts hope the diagnosis will open the door for treating sex addiction like any other mental health issue. Source: eu.usatoday.com
Brett Farmer places Elvis Presley's "orgasmic gyrations" of the title dance sequence in Jailhouse Rock (1957)within a lineage of cinematic musical numbers that offer a "spectacular eroticization of the male image". Lester Bangs credited Elvis as "the man who brought overt blatant sexual frenzy to the popular arts in America." Elvis would grow up to be a beautiful man with soft characteristics (full lips, sleepy eyes) that coupled with his swinging dance onstage accounted for his wild sex-appeal. Elvis's traditional upbringing and high testosterone levels confirmed him as a full-blown heterosexual. The adult Elvis saw no conflict in his desire to wear mascara and carry a gun—the symbolic phallus—at the same time. Albert Goldman's biography Elvis (1981) was clearly attempting to sneer and deride, to debunk the "Elvis Myth", to deplore the squandered potential, even to revel in the degradation. For many fans and critics, Goldman's research was undermined by his intense personal dislike of Presley. The popular music historian Charles Hamm even wanted Goldman's Elvis to bereclassified as fiction. Goldman's research was limited to merely recording with every sign of glee, how Elvis's talent, once arisen, fell back into what Goldman sees as the traditional illiterate half-coma of popular culture.
Mama Gladys raised Elvis on stories about a twin brother who died at birth, imaginable cause of what Albert Goldman sees as Elvis' bad/good "split personality." Gladys' death seemed to remove his wholesome foundation, opening the way to drugs, overeating, sex addiction, occultism, and guns. Later came his TV comeback special on December 3, 1968 and his bizarre Vegas phase, soon followed by a descent into "infantilism, drug invalidism and madness", all triggered by anonymous death threats (Colonel Parker notified the FBI they came from Charles Manson's circle) and Priscilla's infidelities. Elvis Presley is merely the focus for Albert Goldman’s contempt for a kind of successful regional man or mass personality. Goldman is palpably scared by the vitality of non-intellectual life among humankind. Source: markduffet.com
Like Elvis, Jim Morrison's at times ambiguous appeal belonged to his onstage antics. Offstage, Morrison was the most flaming blatant heterosexual you can imagine. He was unswervingly heterosexual in his gender orientation, glowingly sensual and blazingly secure in his very considerable masculinity, ardently devoted to his physical enjoyment of women, and theirs of him, and a gentleman besides. Jim Morrison always craved attention from male and female audiences while his personal sex life was exclusively heterosexual. His face was more than handsome, it was pretty and displayed vulnerability, but he was not feminine. In his eyes something definitely masculine burned. More than masculine, something dangerous. ―"Break on Through: The Life and Death of Jim Morrison" (2014) by James Riordan
“Being drunk is a good disguise,” said Jim Morrison. His pupils dilated, forming a black core that penetrated me. I felt his violence prickling under my skin, threatening to erupt between us. “Now, what are you? A cunt.” I blundered defiantly. “You’re mine. You’re my cunt.” He gave me a desperate, searching look, his voice was raw. “Do you understand that? You’re only mine.” He scrutinized me, waiting for resistance. I gave none, feeling strangely secure and comforted, as if we were locked together in some primal way. His harshness subsided. Later, lying peacefully entwined, Jim asked, “Do you know what I mean when I talk to you like that?” ”I think so,” I said. I felt he was trying to define sexuality, reducing us to the basic elements. “It’s hard to explain,” he began. “No. I do know what you mean,” I thought I did. Jim agreed, lying down beside me and smiling sweetly. He sighed and rolled his head across the pillow to look up at me shyly, almost worshipfully. His eyes were wide and vulnerable, with a boy’s 'do-you-like-me' look. When he took his defenses away like that, it blew me away. All I wanted to do was reassure him, love him; he was a stray child with no mother, lost in the world. We felt raw and tender in the moment and held each other with all the love we’d never found. It seemed the warmth and strength of those who will forever be friends. ”If it wasn’t for this, life wouldn’t be worthwhile,” Jim said, his voice near tears. The desolation in his words scared me. “You know, we really get along well, don’t you think?” he asked, an astonished look spreading across his face. “We should spend a lot more time together.” “It’s easy to be with you, too,” I smiled. We just stared at each other, embarrassed. “You take birth control pills or something, don’t you? I mean, if we’re going to keep seeing each other, we don’t want you getting knocked up or anything.” “I grew up on them,” I said icily. When we walked outside, the smog in L.A.’s air had produced a twilight mirage of color; the evening sky glowed an incandescent lavender, pink, and salmon. Piled into his friend's tiny convertible, we drove down Sunset Boulevard. The night was warm, the lights sparkling. ―"Love Him Madly: An Intimate Memoir of Jim Morrison " (2013) by Judy Huddleston
It was the greatest night of my life/Although I still had not found a wife/We were close together/We tripped the wall and we scaled the graveyard/Ancient shapes were all around us/The wet dew felt fresh beside the fog/Two made love in an ancient spot/One chased a rabbit into the dark/And I gave empty sermons to my head/Cemetary, cool and quiet/Hate to leave your sacred lady/Dread the milky coming of the day ―Graveyard Poem by Jim Morrison
