EDITOR’S LETTER
“Ginger awoke around 1.30pm, rolled over, went back to sleep for a few minutes, then called her mother.
‘How was Elvis?’ her mother asked, and Ginger said she didn’t know, he had never come back to bed, maybe she had better go check on him. She washed and put on her make-up in her own bathroom, then knocked on Elvis’s bathroom door. When there was no answer, she pushed on it and discovered him lying on the floor, his gold pyjama bottoms down around his ankles, his face buried in a pool of vomit on the thick shag carpet. In a daze, she called downstairs and asked to speak to someone on duty, and the maid put Al Strada on the line. She thought there was something wrong, she told him. He had better come quick.”
And that was the end of Elvis Presley, according to page 647 of my Abacus paperback edition of Careless Love, volume two of Peter Guralnick’s peerless biography.
Except it wasn’t — the end, that is. There is a strong argument to say that the end had come years earlier. That the jumpsuited, sweat-soaked Elvis who stumbled through the 1970s was manifestly not the same person as the cowlicked country boy who shook up the world in the 1950s. And there is an equally strong counterargument to say that, closing in on 70 years after his first pelvic provocation, we still have not reached the end, and perhaps we never will.
Elvis survives, Elvis abides — as myth, as meme, or, in our case, as magazine cover star.
So: summer 1977, the King is dead. Summer 2022, long live the King. In June, Elvis will be the subject of a new movie from Baz Luhrmann, director of juke-box extravaganzas as kitsch as the Vegas Strip: Strictly Ballroom, Moulin Rouge!.
It remains to be seen what Luhrmann will make of Elvis’s lurid later years, but Tom Hanks, somewhat against type, is playing Colonel Parker, the singer’s malevolent manager, so that, at least, ought to be worth investigating.
It’s the eternal half-life of Elvis that Mick Brown is concerned with in his excellent tribute for this issue. That, and the magnificence of the performer, the magnitude of his achievement. Because, for all the bathos of his later years, Elvis in full cry is untouchable. If you’ve never seen it, or even if you have, do yourself a favour and YouTube the ’68 Comeback Special, as I did after reading Mick’s piece, for evidence of Elvis’s extraordinary gifts.
More Elvis: for our fashion story in this issue, stylist Luke Day and photographer Mariano Vivanco, both making their Esquire debuts, provide their own spectacular paean to the boy from Tupelo, Mississippi, with a shoot that both recreates and updates Elvis’s utterly distinctive look, cleverly and wittily using clothes from the current menswear collections. It’s instructive, at l
