ELVIS by Albert Goldman; McGraw-Hill; 598 pages; $14.95
"Before Elvis there was nothing," John Lennon stated in one of his last interviews. The exaggeration was permissible; Elvis Presley, a Memphis hillbilly shouter, did, in fact, radically transform popular music in America. Prior to "the Pelvis," the rhythms of rock were buried in the funk of "race" music. In his wake came the generations of rock compounds: -abilly, acid, punk, and, inevitably, Beatlemania. The first to mesmerize the millions of white teen-agers of mid-'50s America, Elvis all too soon degenerated into rhinestone rumbling, and his act, his records and films, even his bloated, tragic end, contained elements of self-parody.
In this fascinating, perverse study, Albert Goldman struggles to take Presley beyond the familiar Late Show caricature. But the author's attempt, like his earlier Ladies and Gentlemen—Lenny Bruce!!, is filled with portentous speculations and lofty pronouncements about the American Dream and its dreamers. What Goldman does provide, however, is a telephoto focus on life behind the mansion wall of Presley's Graceland. Like the histories of those two other native recluses, Howard Hughes and Hugh Hefner, Presley's private existence was a medley of ritualistic fetishes. The public persona, however, was pure stagecraft.
At home in Memphis the blue-suede revolutionary was a pussycat with a distinctly warped psyche. His father Vernon Presley was convicted in 1938 of altering a check and sent to prison. The three-year-old Elvis was fiercely coddled by "the Hillbilly Cassandra," his mother Gladys. Until he was eleven, he slept in the same bed with "Satnin'," his baby-talk name for the mother he stroked and petted until her death. Gladys did not let the boy play out of her sight until he was 15 and still walked him to school in ninth grade. At 16, Elvis transformed his paralyzing shyness into a bizarre statement: greased locks, pegged pants, mascara and eye shadow. Later he would dye his dirty-blond hair black, imitating a hoody Tony Curtis in the 1949 Brooklyn gang movie City Across the River. When Gladys died of a heart attack in 1958, the King of Rock 'n' Roll was still on apron strings. He demanded that her casket be opened. Then he babbled childish words to her "sooties"—their private name for feet.
Other adults mesmerized Elvis as well. With a gravel-voiced, paunchy old carnival huckster, Colonel Thomas Parker, Presley zoomed from white gospel singalongs to gold-record celebrity. The Colonel, claims Goldman, was actually an illegal Dutch immigrant, Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk. According to Goldman, the manager's alien status would explain why Presley never played Europe or Japan.
When the commitment to rock faded, however, Elvis romped in the Hills of Beverly. Like much of Presley's life, this ordinary greed offends Goldman. It is "What makes him so ... echt Amerikan."