AS HOLLY WOOD READIES A MAJOR NEW BIOPIC, MICK BROWN CONSIDERS THE LIFE AND DEATH, AND AFTERLIFE, OF THE MOST ENDURING POP IMMORTAL OF THEM ALL
IN
1957, he looked truly like a god. Breathtakingly — almost indecently — handsome. There in his $10,000 gold lamé suit, the chiselled face, the saturnine eyes, the greased-back pompadour hair, a cowlick falling over his forehead, the curl of the lip, arrogant and amused.
The suit was made by Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors of Hollywood at the behest of Elvis’s manager Colonel Tom Parker, who wanted a golden suit for his Golden Boy — “boy”, in the proprietorial sense being how the Colonel would often refer to his charge, gold being the currency that Elvis was minting, not least for the Colonel, at the height of his fame.
The “$10,000” price tag, like most things to do with the Colonel, was an exaggeration, showmanship; the actual bill of sale was for $2,500. Elvis first wore the suit at a performance at Chicago’s International Amphitheatre in March 1957. In the space of three years, he had recorded eight number-one records, among them “Heartbreak Hotel”, “Hound Dog”, “Love Me Tender” and “All Shook Up”. He was 22 years old, already the hottest property in American music, soon to be the most famous singer in the world. Twenty years later, he would be dead.
Elvis was America writ large, in all its greatness and tawdriness, its promise and its disappointments, its fractured history and its promise of redemption. “The pure products of America go crazy,” wrote the poet and writer William Carlos Williams, and none went crazier than Elvis, his heart giving out on 16th August 1977 as he sat on his lavatory in his Graceland mansion, bloated and broken and bemused by the ingestion of some 10,000 pills in the last year of his life. He was 42.
Medical examiners found that he had traces of 14 drugs in his system at the time of his death, 10 of which were present in significant quantities, including codeine, morphine, diazepam, pentobarbital and ethinamate — drugs most commonly prescribed for anxiety and insomnia.
In a way, it’s easy to believe that Elvis now is bigger than he ever was when he was alive. He has become a myth. A morality tale. His music is lodged forever in the collective memory. His films are playing on an endless loop somewhere on TV.
His life has been dissected, pored over, analysed and referenced countless times in books and articles, such as this one, studied in university courses, endlessly memorialised in films, as souvenirs and in the caricatures of Elvis impersonators. Along with those two other defining figures of his generation, Marilyn Monroe and James Dean — the tragic American trilogy — his image is iconic.
In 2008, an Andy Warhol silk-screen, Eight Elvises, was sold by the Italian art collector Annibale
