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After three and a half years of research, Albert Goldman has written what has been widely anticipated as the definitive biography of Elvis Presley. It is a poignant book, the result of Goldman's winning the trust and confidence of hundreds of sources, including many of Elvis' closest friends. It is also an intimate look at a side of Elvis that few even suspected existed. Many people will find some of the revelations unpleasant and view them as a needless and harmful invasion of privacy. Yet, such revelations comprise a truth about modern American heroism and success. The fact is that somehow inherent in Elvis' great fame as an American ideal and idol is a contradiction that was the seed of destruction.
How did one of the greatest modern American symbols — an original, a creator of standards — come to such a tragic end? Was Presley's fate inherent in his nature? Was it part of his message? Did it have something to do with America? Or was it one of those random combinations of carelessness, greed, egotism and blindness to manipulation?
Whether this process is indeed fated by the nature of talent or the nature of success, or whether this is the nature of American success — or all these things — is what this excerpt from Mr. Goldman's book is about. — Jann S. Wenner
When Elvis Presley returned to America after his years in the army, he was a changed man. His mother's death, his father's remarriage, his own sufferings in the service, as well as the prolonged interruption of his career and his anxiety about its revival, had eroded the great self-confidence he displayed in his early years. Instead of partying with his peers, the young actors and actresses of the Jimmy Dean clique, Elvis locks himself up now in a house with six stooges and never goes out to play. Instead of falling in love with a beautiful film star, he herds hundreds of anonymous groupies through his bedroom. Instead of being basically a sympathetic character with some ugly traits, he becomes an arrogant punk who closely resembles the character he portrayed in Jailhouse Rock. As for his career, he abandons all control over it and submits himself completely to the machinations of Colonel Tom Parker and his cronies in Hollywood. All these things attest to a profound metamorphosis in the character of Elvis Presley. Though they first become manifest when he is discharged from the service, we must search for their source in that deadly wound Elvis suffered when his mother died on August 14th, 1958.
Gladys was as much the source of Elvis' self-confidence as she was the cause of his extreme dependency. She was also his only confidant and his moral governor. Once Gladys died, Elvis found himself desperately alone and naked. His first instinct was to retreat from the world and wall himself round with people who were devoted to him, body and soul. "The Guys," as Elvis called his henchmen, included at this time Red and Sonny West, Joe Esposito, Lamar Fike, Alan Fortas and Gene Smith. His second impulse was to drown his sorrows in an endless round of parties and games that would keep him perpetually distracted from his real state of mind. His ultimate resolution was the most fateful: it was to sever the link between his past and present by totally inverting the relations between his life and his image. Instead of being an innocent and naive kid who impersonated publicly a wild and orgiastic figure, Elvis would now play in public the all-American boy, while off camera he indulged himself in an endless debauch of sex and drugs.
The inception of Elvis' new lifestyle was a two-week furlough that he took in the summer of 1959 in Paris with several of his boys. Settling down at the posh Hotel Prince de Galles, he swiftly discovered an old-rime nightclub on the Champs-Elysees called the Lido, which had a chorus line bearing the legendary title the Bluebelle Girls; in other words, the descendants of those turn-of-the-century chorus girls who had swarmed over the Prince de Galles or Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII. Elvis, wearing for the first time his elegant dress blues and looking like a latter-day version of the Student Prince, instinctively fell into the pattern of his renowned and royal predecessor. Every night he ate dinner at the club; then, after the first show, he swept up the entire chorus line and carried it back to his hotel, where they partied extravagantly, until the phone would ring and the manager of the club would beg Elvis to return the girls so that the supper show could commence. Elvis would witness that show as well and afterward return to his suite with the girls, with whom he toyed till dawn.
When Elvis returned to Hollywood, he showed no sign at first of adopting this orgiastic pattern so close to home. He was still a little inhibited, still exhibiting traces of his mother's morality. Then, one night, a random occurrence initiated a chain of events that concluded with Elvis finding himself once again in a position to indulge his appetite for orgiastic parties. The decisive event was being asked to leave the Beverly Wilshire Hotel for precisely the same reason that had led to Elvis' expulsions from hotels in Germany: extreme rowdiness.
On this particular night Elvis and the Guys were involved in one of those childish games in which he spent so much of his spare time in the early years: a water battle with squirt guns. What made the battle characteristic of Elvis was the violence with which he drove it, that innate violence that always made him take everything to the limits and beyond, never feeling that he had had enough until limbs broke and blood flowed and screams of pain accompanied the pleasure.
First, one of the boys had slipped on the wet kitchen floor and gashed himself deeply on a broken bottle. Then, Red, Joe and Sonny grabbed Elvis and threw him on the floor. As Sonny held Elvis' legs and Joe his midriff, Red rubbed his palm back and forth over Elvis' nose, driving him completely crazy. When he had brought Elvis to the ultimate peak of rage, Red shouted, "Let go!" At that moment, Red and Sunny leaped up and ran for their lives. Joe, seeking to do the same, slipped and fell on the floor. Instantly, Elvis was on top of him, kicking him like a log as he rolled across the floor. Then, Elvis seized a guitar and, swinging it like an ax, hit Joe a stunning blow on the elbow. Joe screamed in pain and lay there watching his arm inflate like a balloon. Red and Sonny, who had circled back, realized now that the fight had gotten out hand, They made a dash through a fire-escape door and took off down the hall with Elvis in hot pursuit. When Elvis saw he couldn't catch up, he threw the guitar with all his might after the fleeing figures.
At that moment, an elderly lady who lived on the floor opened her door. Just as she was about to step out into the hall — whoosh! — a guitar flew by her nose, almost hitting her. Jumping back, she slammed the door and picked up the phone to call the manager. A few minutes later, this worthy was upstairs demanding to know what was going on and inspecting with a horror-struck countenance the damage to the rooms. Next day, Elvis and his boys were asked to leave.
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The Colonel decided at this point that it didn't makes sense to confine these rambunctious boys to a hotel. They needed more space to stretch out — and they needed to be kept away from the little old ladies of this world. The solution to the problem was obviously a good-size private house in some secluded spot. A short search turned up a unique residence in Bel Air that had formerly belonged to Ali Khan and Rita Hayworth. It was a doughnut-shaped structure, ringed around a fifty-foot patio edged with shrubbery. Situated on the side of a winding hillside rood called Perugia Way, the house overlooked the greens of the Bel Air Country Club. Carpeted with thick white shag, filled with expensive California-style furnishings and staffed by a black cook and houseman, this flying saucer was the perfect playpen for a wealthy young playboy. Soon it became legendary as the headquarters of the Memphis Mafia, the most intently partying group of bachelors in the history of Hollywood.
The Presley parties are invariably depicted as tedious get-togethers whose only singularity lay in the disproportion of men to women. Though literally thousands of young women were guests at these parties over the years, those who got beyond the formalities would not have been eager to recount their adventures for the benefit of the press. Nor would any reporter or editor who valued his job in Hollywood have been willing to publish such scandalous tales. Though one hears a great deal about the outrageous violations of privacy suffered by the stars, if we are to judge by the example of Elvis Presley, in his day one of Hollywood's greatest stars — and one about whose private life curiosity reached unprecedented proportions — there are no limits to what a celebrity can do and escape exposure in the film colony.
The parties, which swiftly became the focal point of Elvis' life, would commence every night after supper, at about ten. The basic idea was to fill the house with attractive young women who had been especially selected to conform to Elvis' exacting criteria. Elvis' tastes in women were just as fixed and unvarying as his tastes in food. It was only natural that a man who could subsist for six months at a time on a steady diet of burned bacon, mashed potatoes, sauerkraut and sliced tomatoes would want one and only one kind of girl. The interesting question is: what is the female equivalent of the aforesaid diet?
Elvis liked small, kittenish girls who were built to his ideal proportions. They were to be no higher than five feet two and weigh no more than 110 pounds. The prime areas of erotic interest were the ass and legs. Hair coloring, complexion, facial features were not important, though beauty was, naturally, desirable. What was critical was that the girls be as young as possible, certainly no older than eighteen, and that they be not too far removed from the condition of virginity. Married women were out of the question, and a woman who had borne a child was a complete turnoff for Elvis Presley. As for clothing, Elvis liked to see a pretty girl dressed all in white. When she undressed, he was hoping to see that she wore white underpants. White panties were Elvis' erotic fetish.
All the Guys became, at Elvis' urging, quite accomplished procurers. Their readiest source of supply was the studios where Elvis worked. Most Presley pictures had party scenes that called for as many as a score of pretty young girls. The moment the first call for such extras went out, the Guys were busy among the applicants, like cooks in the morning market, making these selections for the "Boss." After the studios, there were many other sources for Presley chicks: talent agencies, nightclubs, theatres, stores — Hollywood is full of pretty young girls, many of whom will do anything to advance their careers. All one of the boys had to do was mention that Elvis Presley was having a party that night at his home in Bel Air and the prey was winging toward the net.
Once the parties became an institution in Hollywood, a lot of girls started trying to crash the gate. On a typical evening, the whole street and the parking area before the house would be swarming with scores of young women who behaved very much like the crowd seeking admission to a popular discotheque. Like the patrons of a disco, they came in all sorts of costumes, from simple cotton dresses to sweater and pants outfits to stylish frocks topped with fur jackets. Parking their cars along this once-quiet street, they would stand, lean or sit all over the property, chattering and gossiping and looking each other over carefully. The focus of everyone's attention was the heavy brown door to the house, which was opened from time so time by one of the boys, who would admit the girls he knew and tell the others to "try later." As at Studio 54, the decision as to how many and which girls to admit depended entirely on the demands of the party going on inside the house. Some of the more determined girls would remain standing in front of the door until two in the morning.
Once a girl was admitted to the house, she would be ushered about with great politeness by one of Elvis' man-mountains. Her first impression was invariably one of great luxury and style. As you entered the house, for example, you could look straight through the foyer to the patio, which was romantically illuminated as night and filled with the splashing of a fountain as its center, where a statue emptied endless jugs from its shoulder. Sinking into the deep-pile carpet and following her guide as he turned to the left, she would enter first the living room, which was dominated by a fireplace, above which hung a painting, actually a painted photograph, of Elvis, Gladys and Vernon in front of Graceland. The next room around the circle was the den; here the parties were always held. Loud rock music would be playing from an illuminated jukebox filled with Elvis' favorite records; a wet bar at the far side of the room would be piled high with refreshments suitable for a Sweet Sixteen party — soft drinks, potato chips, pretzels, cookies — and in the middle of the room, a TV set, whose back was concealed by a folding mirrored-glass screen, would be playing with its sound turned off.
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Facing the television, on a huge built-in sofa, the King would be enthroned with his feet up on a cocktail table. Flanked by a couple of his men and surrounded by a bevy of young women, he would be watching TV. No matter who arrived, even if she were the most famous or beautiful star in Hollywood, Elvis mould not rise to greet her. "Get her coat... find out what she wants to drink." With such boss-man orders, Elvis would beckon Tuesday Weld, Joan Blackman or Connie Stevens into the circle around him.
Elvis had a very sarcastic and vulgar sense of humor that would emerge when he settled down at ease and removed the phony mask of Southern gentlemanliness that he wore in public. From years of listening to the local wits in his hometown--that type of Southern joker who responds to every situation with a proverbial line and a snap of his extended fore and middle fingers — Elvis had developed quite a patter of Memphis jive. As the aspiring young extras and starlets sitting at his feet constantly looked back and forth from the silent video screen to the immaculately groomed and carefully dressed star, they would be treated to an endless stream of witticisms.
Watching Jerry Lewis caper on the screen, Elvis would sneer and drawl: "That's about as funny as a turd in a punch bowl." Or perhaps he'd say "as funny as a Smitty on a hearse." (A Smitty was the Memphis name for a device designed to make a teenager's motor roar.) Every time Elvis got off one of these gags, the Guys would roar with laughter. Their response would encourage Elvis to continue his commentary.
As there were perhaps forty or fifty girls in the house and only eight men, it would have been natural for the Guys to start hitting on some of these chicks, This was a practice that was sternly forbidden. Elvis considered any such advances highly improper, an act of lese majesty, until he had exercised his prerogative to make the first choice. Allowing Elvis what was called "the pick of the litter" was an obligatory act of deference. To behave differently would be to invite some terrible explosion.
Elvis' temper and his overbearing manner had gotten much worse during his years in the army. The boys who had known Elvis for long said that the army had made him "mean." His ugly traits were greatly exaggerated by the presence of women. When girls were around, Elvis felt obliged to play the big shot, the Boss. He would put one of his little cigars in his mouth, his Hav-a-Tampa Jewels or Rum Crooks, and hold it there a moment. If one of the boys didn't jump up and give him a light, Elvis would explode: "Goddamn it to hell! Am I gonna sit here all night like this, or is one of you lardasses gonna gimme a light?" That sort of behavior was supposed to impress the girls. Elvis didn't stop at just being overbearing. Sometimes he would humiliate his men so grossly that even these faithful flunkies were compelled to rebel.
Sonny West recalls a night when Tuesday Weld came to visit Elvis, bringing along a very attractive friend named Kay. As Elvis and Tuesday got deep into conversation, Sonny started promoting Kay, while preparing a drink at the bar, in the middle of Sonny's pitch, Elvis pops up suddenly between them, stares provocatively at the girl and says admiringly, "You're really pretty!" Then, he flits off to continue talking to Tuesday. Sonny resumes his efforts to woo the young woman and is starting to make progress when Elvis appears again, gives the girl one of his patented heavy-lidded stares and murmurs, "My man!" Just as Sunny is recovering from this fresh intrusion, Elvis swings back for a third pass at the target. This time, he gives the girl a little peck. When she doesn't object, he kisses her firmly on the mouth. She kisses him back. Sonny gives up in disgust and retreats to the other side of the room, where Alan Fortas and Gene Smith are watching the scene.
"He's smooth as silk," rumbles the admiring Fortas. "Yeah, he shot me right outta the saddle," concedes Sonny. Gene leans in confidingly at this point and, nodding his head toward the two women, he says: "Sonny, if you had your pick, which would you take?" Sonny replies without hesitating, "Tuesday--she's got some body on her!"
Elvis, who is always scanning the room, spots Gene and Sunny with their heads together. Instantly, he assumes that they're bad-mouthing him. Jumping up and walking over to the boys, he says, "What the hell are you two whispering about?" Sonny is dumbfounded. He's too embarrassed to repeat the conversation. His confusion confirms Elvis in his conviction that he was the topic of conversaiion. "If you don't tell me," he warns Sonny, "you're in big trouble." Sonny, exasperated, hurt, angry, looks at Elvis and exclaims; "Man, you have changed! I quit!"
In a flash, Elvis grabs a Coke bottle. Sunny barks, "You're not gonna hit me with no goddamn bottle!" Elvis backs down and relinquishes the bottle, but he can't control his anger. The moment Sonny starts walking out of the room, Elvis plants himself in the big boy's path. "You're not quittin'," snarls Elvis, "cause you're fired!" "Call it anything you want!" shouts Sonny. "I'm gettin' outta here!" Nobody could talk back to Elvis and get away with it. Flashing red, Elvis swings from the floor and hits Sonny squarely on the jaw.
If Elvis had been on a movie set, where he was always punching guys out, Sonny would have flown halfway across the room, smashed into a wall and come sliding down onto the floor like a stiff. Instead, he simply twisted his head with the blow and then tamed back to stare at Elvis in shock and pain. As the tears started coming to his eyes, Sonny gasped; "I never thought you would hit me, Elvis!" Then, he turned and left the room.
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It was the only time in Sonny's life that he didn't return a punch. If he had struck back, he would have knocked Elvis into the middle of next week it never crossed Sonny's mind, though, to defend himself. Nobody ever hit Elvis. Though he abused them, humiliated them, hit them with his hands or kicked them with his feet or even drew weapons and threatened their lives, nobody ever struck back at Elvis Presley.
Sonny went to his room and packed. He called his girl and told her that he had quit his job. When he came to the front door, he found Elvis standing there alone. "You got any money, Sonny?" he asked. Sonny said he was okay. Elvis handed him a check, which he had had one of the boys draw. "Can one of the Guys take you someplace?" asked Elvis. "No, I called a cab," replied Sonny. As the cab pulled away from the house, Sonny saw Elvis standing in the doorway.
The other disaster that could ruin a party was a girl who dared to talk back or challenge the Boss. Elvis had strict rules for feminine behavior. As long as women deferred to him, he was gallant to them. If, though, they "gut down on his level," as the Guys put it, then Elvis was freed of the obligation to play the gentleman's role and was allowed to teach the girl her "lesson." One night, for example, the sophisticated daughter of a famous movie star came up to the house. Appalled, most likely, by the court of the Hillbilly King, she made the mistake of getting into an argument with Elvis. Galvanized by a terrible flash of rage, he leaped to his feet, seized the young woman by the hair, dragged her stumbling head over heels across a marble coffee table and into the next room, where he planted a very vigorous kick in her ass and ordered one of the boys to throw her out in the street.
Another night, while he was entertaining a young actress, Elvis got so enraged at something she said that he picked up a watermelon and threw it at her, hitting her a mighty thump on the ass. Throwing things like a hysterical woman was one of Elvis' more dangerous habits. One night, many years later,when he was having supper, Joanie Esposito, Joe Esposito's wife, said something that infuriated Elvis. Instinctively, he hurled the knife that was in his hand straight at her face. If Sonny West hadn't flung up his hand to block the knife, Elvis might have knocked out one of Joanie's eyes.
In 1963, Elvis did inflict a disfiguring injury on a young woman in this manner. She had demanded that one of the boys playing pool with Elvis move his cue so that she could leave the party. Elvis was so enraged by the woman's insistence that he hurled his pool cue at her, striking her on the breast. The cue paralyzed a nerve in the breast, causing it to sag permanently. The must interesting fact about the story is that no compensation was offered the woman and none was sought. As always, Elvis walked away from his misdeed without any apology or desire to make amends. As far as he was concerned, the fault was all the woman's who had provoked him.
Assuming the party was not spoiled by some "fool" or some "bitch," the final phase, about two a.m., after the late movie, would consist of the "slipaway." Elvis would finally rise and make his way past the bar to the adjoining room, which was the master bedroom. This was the signal for all the Guys to take off the wraps. Like beggars at a royal feast, they were free now to enjoy the scraps. All the girls who had been passed over by the Boss were fair game. If the boys could score, they carried their girls off to the other bedrooms. If they were failures, as was poor Lamar so often, they were delegated "night duty," which meant they lay down fully clothed in the living room to snatch some sleep before they were roused before dawn to carry home Elvis' girls.
"Girls" is the word, because Elvis almost invariably retreated to his bedroom with two or three young women in tow. His preference for groups rather than for one-to-one encounters had hardened now into a habit. Must young men with such tastes are assumed to be prodigiously virile studs whose sexual appetites are so enormous that they cannot be satisfied by a single woman. This was certainly not the case with Elvis Presley. Generally, he never had normal sexual relations with these girls. The reason? Elvis was a voyeur.
What he sought as his erotic goal was a group of girls who would agree to strip down to their panties and wrestle with each other while Elvis stared out his eyes with a rocklike hard-on pressing up against his underwear. He accounted for this obsession by recalling an incident from his childhood: a moment when he had seen two little girls tumbling together on the ground with their dresses rising to show their crotches. In fact, with the fine-focus characteristic of his kind, what Elvis described as his ultimate fulfillment was not the sight of the girls or even the crotch but the vision of black pubic hairs protruding around the edges of white panties. Out of all the sexual excitements in the world, this one teasing image represented the ultimate in arousal to Elvis.
The panties were not just a tease, like the fan dancer's fan or the bubble-dancer's bubble. They were also a protective shield. Elvis could not tolerate the sight of a completely naked woman. If one of the gorgeous showgirls or actresses who filled his bed night after night disrobed completely in his presence, he would protest: "You have a beautiful body, but I would feel better if you put something on" Elvis was just as loath to show his own body. As a rule, no woman ever saw him undressed. His shyness focused on his penis, which he called "Little Elvis" and went to great lengths to hide. Instead of pissing in a urinal, for example, he would always go inside a stall, like a woman. He was not modest but ashamed. Like most country boys of his time, he was uncircumcised. A sensitive adolescent at heart, he saw his beauty disfigured by an ugly hillbilly pecker.
He complained also that when he engaged in intercourse, the foreskin, pulled back and forth in the grip of the vulva, would fray and tear, sometimes emerging bloody. There was an obvious solution to this vexing problem, but Elvis could not bear the thought of a knife cutting into Little Elvis.
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If Elvis became sufficiently aroused by the spectacle of the girls wrestling, he might go down on a girl or dry hump her. Gene Smith recalls Elvis changing clothes after a date and looking like he sprayed his jockey briefs full of whipped cream. If Elvis was particularly daring, he might allow a girl to jack him off. One of the familiar tales of the Presley circle concerns the night Elvis went to bed with a famous Hollywood sex kitten. When this aggressive young woman — who had slept with half the men in the movie industry in the effort to advance her career and who had learned through that ordeal as much about men as any old hooker — divined where Elvis was at, she not only jerked him off with great skill but, when he ejaculated, she caught the semen in her hand and rubbed it all over her face like cold cream. Those two moves put Elvis completely in her hands.
If Elvis did have intercourse with an unfamiliar woman, he would never allow himself to ejaculate inside her. He was terrified of an unwanted pregnancy or a paternity suit — or so he averred. The Guys interpreted his anxiety as the product of some episode in his early years, when Elvis had gotten a girl pregnant. An exaggerated fear of knocking a girl up, however, is also characteristic of young men, especially adolescents, who suffer from sexual anxiety and are afflicted with other sexual problems, like premature ejaculation. Though Elvis Presley was always girl crazy, this obsession can sort very well in a young man with a deep underlying fear of women, of marriage and of begetting children: all signs of masculine maturity.
These sexual predilections explain also how it was possible to go through so many women without ever once contracting venereal disease, the universal fate of the swinger. That Elvis escaped all the dangers of the game was owing not to good luck but to the most extraordinary self-control: a lock-hold on his sexual behavior that must have been powered by uncontrollable sexual phobias.
Looking at half-naked girls grappling with each other or jerking off while ogling the centerfold of Playboy or Penthouse was not the end of Elvis' voyeurism. As soon as he moved into the house on Perugia Way, he made provision for indulging this lech on the sly. He observed that the closet of his bedroom had a common wall with an adjacent bedroom, in the neighboring room, the wall was lined with floor-to-ceiling bookcases. Elvis and the boys removed a portion of the wall between the shelves and installed in the space a two-way mirror. Now they were in a position to view everything that happened in the bedroom from a secure location in the closet. The only problem was that normally, nothing was happening in this room. Elvis quickly solved this problem by ordering a couple of the boys to get girls into the room and have intercourse with them while he watched with the other Guys.
This sport had only one danger: with so many guys crowded in the closet, chortling and whispering about the "action" they were watching, there was the distinct possibility that the sound would carry through the wall and alarm one of the girls who was being exploited. Again, Elvis came up with the answer: whenever one of the boys was about to get down with a girl, he must make a point of turning on the radio in the room. He could say that it was more romantic that way or there was such beautiful music on such and such a station. Girls would go for crap like that, and the sound of music would mask the mumbling behind the wall. Eventually, however, it was agreed by all hands that the little window they had opened was not adequate for the proper enjoyment of the show. In the next house the boys occupied, they installed a mirror that was as big as a suburban picture window.
Elvis' second house in Bet Air offered a total change in atmosphere from his first. Instead of an architectural whimsy, redolent of a sheik's tent, the new mansion on Bellagio Road was a classic 1920s movie star's mansion. Modeled upon an Italian villa of the Renaissance, the exterior boasted statues in niches, a steeply landscaped terrace and an old-fashioned swimming pool off to one side. The decor was baronial: a grand entrance foyer paved with marble and adorned with a sculptured fountain, an imposing open staircase to the second floor, an ornamented fireplace rivaling that at Pickfair.
People who have special appetites are very quick to spot novel ways of fulfilling them. No sooner had Elvis moved into this old mansion than he noticed a peculiarity in the dressing room that adjoined the swimming pool. Rather than waste time describing the vision that inspired this latest and grandest peephole, let's examine the finished product.
First, you have to imagine the King and his lusty men bidding a momentary goodbye to a covey of beautiful young women whom they have urged to change into bathing suits so they can all enjoy a dip in the pool. The moment the girls go clattering down the steps beside the pool to the dressing room cut into the sloping hillside, Elvis and the Guys dash around to the side of the building, where there is a little louvered door at ground level that looks like a utility hatch. Opening this door, they crawl into a dark, low space, which they have laboriously excavated by hand from the foundation of the structure. The dirt floor is covered with blankets because there is no room to stand. One wall of the room is a huge plate-glass window that looks directly into the women's side of the locker room. To the women, of course, this huge window appears as a mirror.
Lying on their sides and trying to breathe as shallowly as possible — heavy breathing fogs up the glass and spoils the view — Elvis and the Guys fall to studying the girls as they undress. Though it is often said that voyeurism is a scaredy-cat perversion, this new four-by-eight-foot window was, as the boys discovered, a great test of nerve. As long as the girls removed their clothes or made their toilettes from a distance, the peek effect was prefect. When a girl walked up close to the mirror and stared directly into it — while holding up, perhaps, one breast and then the other for examination — the more timid guys, like Lamar, would be terrified. It was hard to believe that this girl, just inches from your face, couldn't see you lurking there in the darkness.
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Eventually, Elvis got anxious about this king-size window and ordered it removed for transport to Graceland. There the boys sought high and low for a suitable place to install it, but the old house was very ill-suited to such contrivances. Finally, the mirror was stored in the attic, along with many other abandoned toys and devices for recreation. Meantime, the house on Bellagio Road received a new inhabitant who was destined to compensate Elvis for the loss of his old toy by sending the girls screaming around the house every night in a manner that was positively provoking.
Scatter was the ideal frat-house mascot. A forty-pound, three-foot-tall chimpanzee, he had been trained by his first owner, a Memphis cartoonist who used him on his local TV show, to wear clothes, drink whiskey and raise hell with women. When Elvis first brought the beast out to Hollywood, he was enthralled with his antics. Elvis would treat him like a baby, carrying him around on his shoulders, showing him off for company and even changing his diapers. What tickled the Guys must about Scatter was the fact that he was so damn horny. Just let a girl step in the house and old Scatter would be hot on her tail. He would lift up her skirt and stick his head up toward her crotch. He would follow women to the bathroom or try to get inside while they were on the toilet. He would also chug-a-lug a few drinks at the bar and then turn around on his stool and start whacking off in some girl's face.
Elvis was always thinking of fresh ways to use Scatter as a device for driving people crazy. He would have the chimp dressed up in his cute little middy suit and tennis sneakers. Then Scatter would be enthroned in the back seat of the Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud and driven about by one of the Guys wearing a chauffeur's cap. That night Elvis would scream with laughter as the chauffeur, generally Alan Fortas (who has a somewhat simian build), would recount the stories of how this motorist almost ran off the road staring at the chimp or how that old lady looked shocked or a cop on a corner did a triple take as the car went by. What really bugged Elvis was that they could never find one of those trick cars, like they have in the circus, that can be driven from the rear by a hidden operator while the ape sits up front turning the driving wheel. To roll down Hollywood Boulevard on an afternoon with Scatter at the wheel of a big costly Cad, casting looks to right and left with a driver's cap on his head and his long funky fingers wrapped around the wheel — oh, God! Wouldn't that be heaven!
Short of the ultimate thrill, however, there were lots of other tricks you could play with the chimp. One of his most celebrated exploits was the time he got loose at the Goldwyn Studio and climbed up the drainpipe to the second-floor office of the boss, Sam Goldwyn. When Scatter came swinging through the window, Goldwyn's secretary screamed in horror and fled from the room. Scatter kept on going until he was in the Big Man's private office. Before the astonished movie mogul could utter a word, the ape had leaped on his desk and was cavorting among his contracts, pub shots and pictures of his grandchildren. Fortunately, the animal was well diapered, so he couldn't do anything totally outrageous.
The best fun Elvis had with Scatter was always some stunt involving sex. It was as if Elvis were using the beast as his proxy, as the perpetrator of all those crazy sex pranks he would have liked to have played but didn't dare. There was a little stripper, for example, who was a regular at the Presley parties. Elvis would entice this girl to come up to the house; then he would persuade her to get down on the floor and wrestle with Scatter. She wasn't much bigger than the chimp. If you didn't look too carefully, you would swear that the horny ape and the hot little chick were getting it on. That killed Elvis.
Another time, when one of the Guys went upstairs with a young woman who was an aspiring songwriter, Elvis got Alan and Sonny to slip Scatter into the bedroom after the couple had started balling. Scatter outdid himself on this occasion, eliciting from the girl some of the loudest and most piercing screams of his entire career. Sad to say, the guy was so outraged that he picked up the beast and hurled it about ten feet down the hall.
Poor Scatter! He soon suffered the fate of all Master Elvis' other toys. He lost his charm and was shipped back to Graceland, where he was installed at the back of the house in an air-conditioned cage. Neglected after all the attention he had received for years, he pined and drooped and turned vicious. Late in the Sixties, he bit a maid who was feeding him. Two days later, he was found dead in his cage.
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About the time Scatter died, the steady advance of electronic technology provided Elvis at last with the the perfect toy for a man who was an orgiast, a voyeur and a masturbator. It was the first Sony videotape machine for "home use." Once Elvis got this machine, he was enabled to seek relief from the monotonous routine of acting in films by getting behind the camera and functioning as a director. He soon found some cooperative young women and set to work turning out an endless series of bedroom follies. What he was after in these films was what he had been after all his life in sexual encounters: a chance to watch while beautiful young women grappled with each other and simulated lesbian sex. Naturally, no one but Elvis was permitted to view these hot reels. Once, however, one of the Guys found the opportunity while Elvis was away from home to view some of the forbidden footage What he saw shocked him profoundly. The two girls who flashed on the screen, naked save for white panties, were intimates of the Presley circle. They were giggling and wrestling and taking turns diving into each other's crotches. At the end of the film, Elvis suddenly popped up before the camera with a full erection and a very smooth jack-off motion.
Eventually, Elvis made a great auto-da-fe of his private videotapes. Yet some of the tapes escaped destruction. They are allegedly being peddled in Las Angeles at high but not exorbitant prices: $500 for a five-miinute quickie and $1500 for a long-playing orgy. In that great black market that consists of bootleg Elvis records, TV outtakes and other sought-after items, these home movies must be the most sought after items. As biographical documents, their value is also enormous. What could be more basic to the study of a great sex hero than a filmed record of his sex life? Perhaps that is what Elvis meant when he said that someday he wanted to write an autobiography entitled Through My Eyes.
Eventually, Elvis discovered a curious genre of soft-core pornography that appealed to him even more than his private videotapes or the hard-core Danish stuff that came on the American market of the late Sixties. As this type of pornography pleased him more than any other, we are justified in regarding it as the clue to his basic sexual fantasies. Interestingly these were of a highly hostile yet not conventionally sadistic variety. The films Elvis relished are called in the trade "cat films." Their subject is women fighting. The typical film opens upon a shot of a couple of tough, coarse-looking broads sitting on a sofa and having a violent quarrel about a man. Suddenly, one the women reaches over and slaps the other's face. The second woman retaliates by grabbing her by hair. Then they really get into it like a couple of cats, screaming and clawing. Inevitably, their legs go up and the viewer gets a flash at there panties, which was part that most excited Elvis. By the end the film, the women have sliced each other to wrecks.
As it's impossible to watch two people fighting without identifying one or the other, these films offered Elvis Presley the opportunity to experience vicariously the pleasure of beating up a woman while at the same time protecting himself psychologically from the shame or guilt that would have been entailed if it were a man with whom he was identifying, a man who would obviously be a stand-in to himself. That Elvis' basic relations with women took the form of push and shove is clear from his behavior during his teenage pajama parties. That there was an angry hard-on behind these little games we should not have known but for cat films. His excitement in viewing these films suggests not just his fundamental hostility toward women, which is pretty clear from his stage act, but also the source of that hostility.
The typical woman in a cat film is a hefty, older woman of a type flat Elvis could easily have associated unconsciously with Gladys. If this sounds improbable, bear in mind that nothing is more basic to a mama's boy than deeply buried hatred for the woman who has enslaved him and frustrated him and imprisoned him psychologically for a lifetime, including all the years after her death.
One cannot relinquish the subject of Elvis Presley's sex life without considering the widespread suspicion that he was latently or actively homosexual. Perhaps the most perceptive way of viewing this issue is to stress the fact that Elvis was above all an adolescent sex hero. Adolescence is a period of imperfect sexual differentiation, a fact that was once proclaimed by our very language: the word girl, meaning in the vocabulary of Chaucer a young person of either sex. What Elvis projected through his epoch-making act was not just the enormous sexual excitement of puberty but its androgynous quality. Much of Elvis' power over young girls came not just from the act that he embodied their erotic fantasies but that he likewise projected frankly feminine traits with which they could identify. This AC/DC quality became, in time, characteristic of rock stars in general, commencing with Mick Jagger and the Beatles (who had such ravishingly girlish falsettos) and going on to include Jim Morrison, David Bowie, Elton John and many figures of the punk pantheon. It's also worth noting that "punk," in its original meaning, as prison jargon, signifies the passive homosexual lover of a tough, typically older convict. (The subliminal meaning of Elvis' role in Jailhouse Rock is that he is Hunk Houghton's punk.)
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When you dig down to the sexual roots of an Elvis Presley, you sense a profound sexual ambivalence. Elvis plays the strutting, overbearing macho in public, but in private he loves nothing better than to roughhouse with teenage girls with whom he exchanges beauty secrets. His basic erotic image is a crotch covered with white panties and showing a bit of pubic hair — an image no different essentially from male to female. Eventually, as we shall see, he staged orgies in which the star was an aggressive lesbian who not only wrestled with other girls but dominated them sexually, just as an aggressive man might dominate a submissive woman — while Elvis got his kicks by watching. The inference is irresistible, therefore, that at bottom, Elvis identified with a strong, aggressive woman rather than a young, aggressive man. As his mother was precisely such a woman, threatening to bash in his father's head with a heavy skillet while calling him "steercotted" (deballed), it makes sense to conclude that Elvis was his mother's son in sex as in everything else.
The flourishing of Elvis' perverse sex appetites in the Sixties is paralleled by the sudden escalation in his consumption of drugs during this period. Prior to 1960, there is no evidence that Elvis was habituated to any sort of drug but benzedrine or amphetamine compounds. These pep pills had been part of his life since his first days on the road, and his use of them had continued straight through the period of his service in the army. Once he got back to Hollywood, however, he suddenly began consuming a whole range of drugs that produce narcotic and hypnotic as well as stimulant effects. How he first discovered and familiarized himself with these drugs is unknown; but, considering his later practices, it is very likely that he owed his introduction to these dangerous pills to the doctors to whom he complained of his inability to sleep.
Elvis was always an insomniac; now, under the stress of making movies and overstimulated by the constant use of dexies to get him going after nights with little or no sleep, he must have quickly approached that manic, round-the-clock sleeplessness that is typical of the speed freak. To one who believed that the solution to any problem of mind or body was a drug, nothing would appear more logical as an antidote to uppers than the use of downers. So, it is not surprising to learn that as soon as he became established at the Beverly Wilshire, he came to an understanding with a druggist at the Chrysler Pharmacy in the hotel lobby. This man began to supply Elvis with unlimited quantities of drugs without prescriptions, at the price of one dollar a pill.
Soon Elvis was buying $7000 or $8000 worth of pills at a time and paying for them by check. No less great than the volume was the variety of thugs that Elvis and the Guys began to experiment with at this time. They were into Dexamyl, Quaalude, Percodan, Demerol, Seconal, Tuinul, Valium, Nembutol and Placidyl. One of the reasons there were so many drugs is that Elvis discovered in this period what was to be, along with the Bible, his favorite book for the rest of his life: The Physician's Desk Reference. This bulky volume, with its exhaustive enumeration of every pill in the pharmacopeia, accompanied by a full clinical description and a very tantalizing picture, became Elvis' favorite study. With his prodigious appetite for pleasure and his quick, retentive memory, he had both the motive and the means to explore all the resources of the legal drug world. So obsessed did he become with this theme that he even made a sly public confession. In an interview in Parade in November 1962, he is quoted as saying, "I've got very simple pleasures. I like to read medical books. One time in high school I thought I'd become a doctor." How sweet! How goody-goody! How sick!
Elvis' way of playing doctor soon produced nearly fatal results. Gene Smith recalls driving back to Memphis at this time in a Dodge mobile home that Elvis used instead of taking the train. Smith was so overstimulated from being awake for three days and two nights on speed that he couldn't fall asleep. He complained to Elvis, who quickly upped with the cure: a 500-milligram dose of Demerol, a synthetic opiate. Smith popped the tiny white pill and waited for the anticipated relief. For another forty-five minutes, he stared at the highway with his mind still racing the van. Finally, good ole Doc Presley gave the insomniac another 500-milligram pill. Smith retired to the back of the van and lay down on one of the beds.
An hour later, Billy Smith, who was riding up front with Elvis, who was driving, went to the rear to check on his cousin. He found Gene laid out cold, barely breathing and with a heartbeat so slow and faint that it seemed he must be near death. Billy had only recently been the one who discovered Junior Smith dead in his bed, probably the victim of an overdose. Now he realized that he was witnessing the same thing happening all over again. He rushed into the front of the van and warned Elvis. "Pull off!" he shouted, "I think there's something the matter with Gene!" "What do you mean?" demanded Elvis, steering the bulky vehicle off the road. "I shouted as loud as I could in his ear, and he didn't move a muscle," cried Billy. "I think he's dead!"
Bringing the van to a lumbering, lunging halt, Elvis scrambled into the back compartment, followed by Billy and Joe Esposito. After trying everything they knew to rouse the comatose drug victim, they hauled him out onto the highway. It was a freezing cold night. The unconscious man was clad only in jeans and a T-shirt. For three hours, the boys took turns dragging the limp body back and forth along the road. Finally, the drugged boy began to come out of his stupor. If Gene Smith had been allowed to lie in his bunk a couple of hours more, Elvis and the Guys would have brought him home dead.
This was by no means the only time when Elvis' reckless dispensing of drugs nearly caused a death among his friends and lovers. Like all heavy drug users, Elvis was keen on having everyone around him doing what he was doing. This pattern of imposing his addictions on his entourage is readily explainable by two of his basic character traits. On the one hand, he loved to wield authority, to be the boss and force others to do his bidding. On the other hand, like most drug abusers, he suffered from a vague sense of guilt that he sought to dissipate by telling himself that everyone was doing just what he was doing. Polypharmacy loves company.
It needs no saying that in forcing all this junk down other people's throats, Elvis was imposing on their trust and naivete. Ultimately, what he was doing was exploiting their attachment to him to gather them into the embrace of his own profoundly self-destructive lifestyle. Though Elvis figures in the Myth as a refulgent life giver, a priestly figure dressed in white and dispensing love and vitality to the world gathered at his feet, in his private aspect he was precisely the opposite figure to that projected by his image. No less glamorous, possibly even more beautiful and inductive than the life giver, in his private world he was the ancient figure of Hebrew legend, the Maloch HaMovet — the Angel of Death.
It is worth remarking in this connection that though Elvis turned square, in his public image after the army years, he never altered in the direction of his private development, which carried him swiftly down the well-worn grooves of the drug underworld. Though he made his peace with the establishment and danced to the Colonel's tune on the day shift, at night he was still the same old cat, perpetually on the prowl, miffing his way along the trail that led to ever more bizarre sexual perversions, drug addictions and spiritual and mental delusions and hallucinations.
Elvis Presley is therefore that classic American figure: the totally bifurcated personality. Always professing his undying love and loyalty to ma, country and corn pone, always an unregenerate Southern redneck who stopped just short of the Klan and the John Birch Society, he was also the first great figure in that devolution of American society that has led to the narcissistic, anarchistic, junked-up heroes of the world of rock and punk. A Faustian figure, like most of our American myth-men, he registers with perfect clarity both poles of the American schiz. What makes him so appalling and alarming — but, again, so echt Amerikan — is his incredible innocence and self-righteousness, his stunning incapacity to recognize or even sense subliminally the total contradiction that informs his being. Accustomed to living in two worlds simultaneously, the day world of the squares and the night world of the cats, he embraces disjunction as the natural and inevitable condition of human existence. It is this Janus-like existential stance that makes him appear so often an enigma. Yet, though he lacks a middle term that could unite the opposite and opposing halves of his soul, he makes perfect sense as a totally responsive being who found himself alive at a time when the national values pointed in divergent directions and who reacted by rushing off in both directions at once.
[From Issue 335 — October 21, 1981]